


Live Oak, with Moss

by prufrock



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, American History, Anal Sex, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Arthur Morgan Deserves Happiness, Bathing/Washing, Bisexual Arthur Morgan, Bottom Arthur Morgan, Boxing & Fisticuffs, Canon-Typical Violence, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Medical Procedures, Mutual Pining, Oral Sex, Outdoor Sex, Period-Typical Racism, Reunions, Self-Destruction, Surgery, Top Charles Smith, references to lynching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-09
Updated: 2020-11-09
Packaged: 2021-03-09 03:47:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,171
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27478294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prufrock/pseuds/prufrock
Summary: Tuberculosis doesn't kill Arthur. Neither does Micah Bell. After the events of RDR2, a seriously injured and sick Arthur follows the advice of his physician to "get somewhere dry, and warm" and travels west to the state of Argent, where he finds work on a sheep farm and undergoes a risky operation to combat his illness. Meanwhile, Charles hears about what happened to the gang after his departure. Restless, unable to gain closure, and in desperate need of money, Charles begins taking local prizefighting matches, eventually moving west to the mining town of Comstock in northern Argent. Eventually, their paths will cross.Tl;dr: Arthur's sick. Charles is sad. There's a lot of boxing, a lot of pining, a blowjob, fake history, and love.
Relationships: Arthur Morgan/Charles Smith
Comments: 27
Kudos: 138





	Live Oak, with Moss

**Author's Note:**

> _I SAW in Louisiana a live-oak growing,  
>  All alone stood it, and the moss hung down from the  
>  branches,  
> Without any companion it grew there, uttering joyous  
>  leaves of dark green,  
> And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of  
>  myself,  
> But I wondered how it could utter joyous leaves,  
>  standing alone there, without its friend, its lover  
>  near—for I knew I could not,  
> And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves  
>  upon it, and twined around it a little moss,  
> And brought it away—and I have placed it in sight in  
>  my room,  
> It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear  
>  friends,  
> (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)  
> Yet it remains to me a curious token—it makes me think  
>  of manly love;  
> For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in  
>  Louisiana, solitary, in a wide flat space,  
> Uttering joyous leaves all its life, without a friend, a  
>  lover, near,  
> I know very well I could not._
> 
> \- Walt Whitman

**Arthur - 1899**

When the sun rises, Arthur still hasn’t died. 

It takes him a minute—casting his botched gaze right and left, shifting minutely against the cliffside to hear the hoarse grinding of bone on bone—to be sure. He’s never died before, but it can’t _hurt_ this much; every inch of his back a swelling bruise, each breath like hot gravel poured through his chest, pain in every fiber of his face just from squinting into the sunlight. And if that weren’t bad enough, his nose fucking itches, prickling like hell where Micah broke it. It’s that, in the end, that convinces Arthur he’s still alive. Dead men don’t itch. 

He gathers his strength, pushes up onto one elbow, and drags his wrecked body up into a sitting position. Which fucking hurts. It leaves him coughing, darkness billowing across his vision as he fights for breath. Maybe, he thinks, it’s happening now. He was only a little behind schedule. But he doesn’t die, just coughs until he vomits a limp stream of blood and phlegm and bile onto the ground, twice, and then falls back empty and rasping and still very much alive. 

His breath and birdsong are all he can hear. It’s like he’s sitting at the fork of two rivers, one wild and the other calm. He’s caught in the rocks in the middle of the stream, and the rivers are deciding whether or not to pull him under. 

Behind him, rock clatters against rock. 

“Dutch?” His own voice surprises him. Turns his stomach. The shadow of the hawk that dislodged the stones passes over him in cool silence. 

Idiot. 

Time passes, or he passes in and out of time, and the sun burns overhead so bright he can feel his skin cure and crack under its heat, and then the sun sets, and he’s still alive. 

It’s night when he finally moves, not because he knows where he’s going but because he’s identified a current of the pain as _thirst_. His throat aches from it, his lips are chapped from it, and he stumbles down the path, pausing to lean on rocks and trees and cough himself dizzy, until he reaches a cold stream and more or less falls face-first into it. 

It helps. Arthur lies with his face in the water for a long time, gulping cool mouthfuls and letting the numbing mountain chill spread all the way around his face as the stars come out overhead. 

He spends the night half-in, half-out of the stream. When dawn starts to break again he heaves himself up and walks—not heading anywhere for sure, just deeper into the forest. His body’s heavy, weighed down by a sodden jacket and exhaustion so deep it breaks his stride every few steps, and yet he feels lighter than he has in years. Empty-handed. Untethered. He’s nothing but a body, moving north, everything that made him Arthur carried on John’s back towards Copperhead Landing, probably bobbing now in a boat over the Lannahechee. If Arthur knew how to pray, he’d pray he’s right about this. 

Mid-morning he finds an abandoned shack. There’s a dog dead on the front steps and a woman dead on the bed inside, both more bone than skin, and Arthur says “I’m sorry” aloud in his ugly, broken voice as he tips her and her mattress together onto the floor. She clatters around his feet, and he lies down on the bare rusted springs of the bed frame and sinks into suffocating sleep. 

He spends six days in the shack, sleeping and coughing and eating the mushy canned peas he finds underneath the sink. Six is an estimate—he can’t always tell when he wakes up whether he’s been out for an hour or ten—but by the last day the scars on his face are starting to harden and it hurts less to swallow. He can stand upright and walk a few paces without getting out of breath. Shuffling through the wardrobe for anything worth taking, he finds a sturdy black coat, a striped shirt, and trousers hanging beside the dead woman’s second house dress. He goes to the back door and swings it open, squinting in the sudden light, and finds her husband’s bones strewn across the yard like so many broken sticks. 

As evening falls, Arthur builds a fire in the yard and hauls water from the well to heat over the coals. He peels the shirt off his back, grimacing at the smell of two weeks of fever sweat and old blood, and washes in the fading light. In the lengthening shadows, he can see the purple outlines of Micah’s fists on his biceps and ribs. 

What happened on the mountain seems like a dream. He can’t hold onto the memory; can’t be sure what happened first and what followed. John’s gone. That he knows, that he can be sure of, remembering the anxious lift in John’s voice, arguing with him on the cliffside to _just keep pushing_. John got away, even if it’s just for another day, and that’s done with now. The rest—Arthur doesn’t know, and the silence around the cabin gets louder as he stares down at the bruises. He wishes he’d kept the journal, just to write it all down and force it to stay. Instead it’s clogging his brain, a cold, clinging congestion that makes each distinct thought an effort. 

He doesn’t know where Dutch is. All his life, Dutch has come and gone and kept his secrets and stumped everyone around him—he was _mercurial_ , that was Hosea’s word, and it works through the fog in Arthur’s brain and turns to a lump in his throat. You couldn’t never keep your eye on Dutch, because right when you thought you knew where he was going, he’d turn up in the other place, and he’d have outsmarted you and you’d both know it. But that was a part of the trick—he’d always turn up. Couldn’t let you have the last word. This time, for the first time, Arthur thinks, it’s different. Dutch is gone, gone because he wants to be, gone in the way people go when they mean to disappear, and for the first time in twenty years and more, Arthur hasn’t got a clue where he’s headed or how much distance lies between them. 

Thinking it feels like taking a step off a solid road into thin air. Arthur rolls his shoulders forward and watches the coals and waits for the hot panic in his chest to subside. 

What next. That’s the next thought that swims into focus, and he can hear Hosea: _there’s what I love you for, boy, you’re a pragmatist; it means you’re a very boring man_. He pushes the memory away, swallows the grief, and allows himself to take a boring view of the situation.

On foot, resting every hour to regain his breath, it takes days to get off the mountain and across the Dakota. By the time he reaches Wallace Station on a cold clear night, his beard’s grown out and the bruises on his arms and chest have faded to yellow and green. 

“Where to?” the fellow at the ticket counter asks, and Arthur doesn’t know. 

“End of the line, I guess.” 

The clerk points up at the map on the wall. “Saint Denis, or Big Flats?” Arthur traces the dotted line up from Strawberry, through the winding mountain passes and to the west, looping out across a blank expanse stamped _State of Argent_. There’s Big Flats—a dark speck on the farthest edge of the Pacific Union Railroad Company map. A nothing. A mystery. 

_We keep heading west._ “Big Flats,” Arthur says, and wonders if he’ll ever stop listening to Dutch.

Arthur sleeps on the train. It’s not something he’s done often. He can still remember taking the train with Dutch and Hosea into Chicago, how surprised he was at the weightless speed underneath him, how he rolled into the Great Central Station green around the gills from the unfamiliar motion. John was the one who always slept like a baby on trains, usually snoring against Arthur’s shoulder. Arthur prefers to watch. He likes being ready. But tonight, with fatigue pulling at the backs of his eyes and his lungs rumbling in his chest and nothing to be ready for anymore, he sleeps. 

When he wakes, the train is cutting through open country, wide brown prairie and big gray sky above. Arthur sits up, feeling bones crack in his neck, shaking loose a cough that rocks him for a few minutes and sends a nice lady down the car to a seat further removed. Arthur rolls to his feet, slips out the door to the platform on the back of the car, and spits over the railing into the flying dust. The desert swallows his blood, and he takes in a lungful of dry air. Then lights a cigarette, because he’s still dying. 

So this is the State of Argent, Arthur concludes, watching the land speed past. They’ve left Ambarino’s jagged topography behind, and there’s none of the low green undulation of the Heartlands. The bleak expanse reminds him a little bit of the plains around Blackwater, but that was farmland. Here, the sky seems higher, the air thinner, and the mountains form a dark afterthought on the horizon on every side of land that looks so hard and unforgiving Arthur’s surprised to see bright patches of copper and sage scrub along the tracks. 

The train pulls into Big Flats just as the sun is setting behind the low ridge of mountains that sit below the city, laid out on a neat grid between rocky foothills and a dead salt lake. Arthur gets off the train aching, bones jarred and pinioned by half a day’s rattling over iron tracks. On the platform, before he can look up at the city, he braces himself against a pole and coughs. 

Big Flats is grand. From the train station, Arthur heads down Deseret Boulevard towards Main Street, a wide thoroughfare that cuts through town and opens towards the low peaks just south of the city. This is a kind of civilization Arthur’s never seen before: not the knotted, thorny opulence of Saint Denis, or the sooty industrial rat-trap of Chicago. This is a city built by clean folks; _modern_ folks. Arthur, with blood in his beard and the sweat and mud of the mountains ground into his stolen clothes, feels like a fat black fly on the pristine surface of Main Street. 

Charles’s voice is in his head, as if he’d just sauntered up to Arthur’s shoulder here in this town in the middle of the desert. “You’re lucky. You got the chance to do something better.”

“Do what?” Arthur asks aloud, but Charles doesn’t answer. 

_The best thing is rest. Getting somewhere warm, and dry, and taking it easy._

With no idea where to go, he turns onto Temple Street and walks against the tide of clean people away from the high steel-framed towers at the center of town, out past the exhibition hall and towards the lower roofs of the houses spread out along the eastern edge of town. From here, he can see the great salt flats stretching out beyond the city, a vast scaly patch on the face of the land, like nothing Arthur’s ever seen before. Something dead at the edge of life. 

_Now, is that possible?_

He thinks about Charles, away up in Canada with a man whose life Arthur ruined. He thinks about Archie Downes. He thinks about Dutch, wonders if he was ever on that mountain top at all, or if that was Arthur’s own wishful thinking, wonders if he’ll ever be able to trust his own memory again. _Taking it easy_ . _Keep pushing_. 

Ain’t I lucky, he thinks, and turns toward the heart of town. 

**Charles - 1899**

In Canada, the buffalo are dying. No, that’s wrong—that’s passive. It allows for ambiguity. In Canada, settlers are killing the buffalo as quickly as they can, as though they’re being paid to kill the world, as though watching death gets them off or fills their bellies or makes them bigger men. Charles wakes up every day sick. 

What he wants to do, what he _really_ wants to do more than he wants anything else, is to mount Taima and ride out on the teeming prairie and beat every white man he finds shooting buffalo. It wouldn’t solve anything, except maybe it would: if word got out that Charles Smith breaks the jaws of men who leave dead buffalo on the plains, maybe more men would stay at home and eat their dinners and fuck their wives and feed their pigs and leave the land and the buffalo and the Wapiti alone. But he can’t do that. He’s here to help Rains Fall, and what Rains Fall needs is not an enforcer. He needs a diplomat, and more than that, a quartermaster. With the buffalo dying, there’s not enough food, and Charles Smith can’t negotiate with the Canadian government by day and kill poachers by night. He just can’t. 

He’s in La Reine today to meet with Lieutenant-Commander Martin to arrange the distribution of rations among the people he and Rains Fall have settled at Running Stream Ranch. He isn’t optimistic about the meeting. He’s been to too many like it to entertain that indulgence, but he hopes—even that feels too strong—he’s _determined_ to walk out with a deal for subsistence. Something that will keep the children alive through the winter. And when spring comes, they’ll figure out the next step. Or he, Charles, will. Rains Fall, these days, doesn’t say much. 

He’s pausing at the general store to buy cigarettes and candy for the kids before his meeting when he hears the newsboy. 

“American outlaws shot dead in the Grizzlies! Wanted killers on the run!” 

Charles pauses. He knows American outlaws in the Grizzlies. He knows wanted killers. 

The newsboy is at the end of the sidewalk, hand outstretched over his head both to wave the paper and shade his eyes from the sun, bawling at the top of his puberty-strained voice. Charles, who knows he’s imagining things, abandons his quest for tobacco and sugar and heads towards him. 

“Hey.” 

“Hey, mister,” the kid says, squinting up at him over fat, sunburnt cheeks. “Fifty cents.” 

Charles digs in his pocket for the coins, studying the headlines on the stack at the kid’s feet: _A Patriotic Fund to Be Raised by the Citizens of the Territorial Capital. Pirates of Penzance: First Local Attempt At Production of Opera Proves a Splendid Success_. 

“I thought you said there were killers on the run,” he says, handing over the money. 

The kid snorts. “Page 8, mister. I know how to sell.” 

Charles chuckles and walks off, sifting through the back pages for the story. And sure enough, there it is on page 8, under International News: “U.S. Marshals in pursuit of noted criminal gang.” Charles goes back into the general store, purchases his cigarettes and puts the candy away in his bag, and sits on a stone wall outside to read the article as the streets of La Reine hum around him. 

It’s short. 

“Authorities in the states of Lemoyne, New Hanover, and Ambarino seek the noted criminal artist Dutch van der Linde,” and Charles hates knowing how much the man would like that styling, “for larceny, homicide, and general terrorism in the region. Van der Linde and his associates are suspected in the 1899 death of Angelo Bronte, a noted figure of industry in Saint Denis, and are wanted in connection with an attempted train robbery. Agents of the federal government report one of van der Linde’s associates found dead in the outlaws’ hideout.” 

That’s all. Charles finishes reading, folds up the paper, and lights a cigarette. 

When he was younger, maybe fifteen or sixteen and living hand to mouth in Bad Lake, Charles met a man named Logan Hood. Hood wasn’t, to Charles’s sparse memory, a bad man. He was a driver for the Butterfield Mail, and he talked a lot like Charles’s father, before the drink changed his voice and his face and the way he moved and who he cared for. Logan Hood met Charles near the post office and bought him a meal, and when he saw that Charles knew how to handle himself he took him along on a mail run and paid him $5. For two weeks he paid Charles $5 a day to ride shotgun, and one night he took his pants down and he got his fingers into Charles’s hair and Charles fought and turned and ran as fast as he could. 

After that, Charles was on his own. It wasn’t an ideology so much as straight logic: the odds on trusting other men, with his skin and his nose and his look and his bad luck, was never good enough. So he kept to himself, took odd jobs when he could, never stayed long, and learned not how to fight, which he knew already, but how to win every fight that came his way. He met more Logan Hoods, worked for some, avoided the rest, and he turned eighteen and then twenty and then twenty-five, which made him older than his mother ever was. 

And then—maybe he got tired. Dutch van der Linde was a Logan Hood: not a man who’d touch boys but a man who’d use them, and do it with a smile and a sincere belief that nothing he was doing could ever really hurt them, or if it did, that no one would have to know. But Charles trusted him anyway. He wants to tell himself that he never did, that he saw through the theater at every turn, but he’d be lying to himself. He stayed for eight months, and he watched Rains Fall’s son die because Charles was too tired, too hungry, too stupid or too lonely to stop it. 

_One of van der Linde’s associates found dead in the outlaws’ hideout._ Charles knows why he stayed. He knows, and can’t account for it. He sits for another minute, watching wagons clatter past on the pale mud, listening to the newsboy holler, and tries to remember the last thing he said to Arthur Morgan. 

The church bell strikes eleven, and Charles has to go now. He has to meet with Commander Martin and he has to arrange for rations to be sent to Running Stream Ranch. He lights another cigarette, puts the newspaper carefully into his bag, and walks towards city hall as the bells thunder overheard. 

**Arthur - 1899**

_Well Dutch I’m_ _alive_ _._

—

_Big Flats_

_This is the farthest west I been since I was a boy. Maybe this is where Dutch wanted to be, before it all went wrong at Blackwater. On the way to California and a new world. This certainly is a new world—on Main Street I seen a temple made of I think marble, taller than any church I ever seen. Folks say this is the Tabernacle of the Latter Day Saints so I suppose it is a church of some kind._

_Bought this journal in a shop along Main Street (a few doors down from the temple). Don’t know what I will write here but lately I cannot seem to keep a thought in my head or tell what is real and what is a dream, so if I write it down maybe it will help._ _I don’t_ _I don’t know how I will make any money without the gang but I suppose the fellow renting me the room will want to have some money for it._

_For the first time I am really alone._

_—_

_Big Flats is a strange town. Folks round here are all very polite and will help you if you are down. I was took with a fit of coughing while waiting for the streetcar and was told where to find the best doctor in town and asked if I can stand to walk on my own to which I answered yes. For now. No money for a doctor but I recovered with most of my dignity and have not fallen down since I came west._

_I went to the post office to inquire about work and discovered that I do not know how to look for a job. Didn’t know how to explain to the feller at the desk that I’m a grown man and never worked an honest job that didn’t involve killing folks or stealing their things. I suppose I had a post as a sheriff’s deputy in Lemoyne but I don’t think that counts. I reckon I will have to keep trying._

_—_

_Cough getting worse_

_—_

_Cannot sleep as this cough is too bad. It has been ten days in this state and already I am seeing the difficulty of finding honest work with a gunslinger’s history and no knowledge of decent business. Dutch would say this shows that the game is rigged against folks like him and me only I no longer know which parts of Dutch’s wisdom hold true._

_I wonder how John and Abigail and Jack are getting along. How I loved them all_

_—_

_Walked to the edge of town today to see the salt flats this city is named for. Strangest thing I ever saw—the place where a lake died and left behind a crust of salt like dry snow over the earth. Wanted to lick it to see if it really is_ _salty_ _._

_—_

_I can’t breathe in this city. Don’t know if it’s the civilization or if my illness has progressed but I wake up suffocating every night. I don’t believe I have slept a whole night since what happened back in the mountains._ _Dutch_

_Met a fella today at the saloon named Fred Bowers who said that his ma and pa was just murdered in the south of the state and he is looking for justice for their killings. Together we had a few drinks and by the time he had reached the bottom of the bottle I learned that ten years previous to this his father shot a man named Ebeneezer Wallace whose widow now owns the biggest ranch in the state. Seems folks down below the mountains have made a way of life out of murdering each other for their ranches. Anyways this Bowers asked me if I knew anything about ranching and I said very little but that I am looking for honest work and he requested that I meet him at his hotel this Tuesday. I told him that I am dying but will try to make the appointment._

_Maybe there is hope for a retired gunslinger yet._

**Charles - 1900**

The rabbit is behind a thorn bush when Charles spots her. He’s been watching since mid-morning as he rides, feeling the well of hunger deepen in his belly, but there’s a wolf stalking the ridge above them and the ground still hasn’t thawed, and game is scarce. Smaller creatures are staying hidden. Staying warm. Charles, whose hands are chapped and bleeding, can’t blame them. 

He slides out of the saddle, pulling his bow off his shoulder, and takes aim, pausing his breath as he pulls the arrow back. He hears it meet its target mid-leap, and exhales. 

Crossing the Grizzlies in March wasn’t the brightest idea, but Charles’s supply of good ideas has been running low. Like everything. Charles spent the winter watching supplies dwindle, waking and sleeping with the constant arithmetic of mouths and cans and cartons and empty stomachs running through his head, never able to keep quite enough in the crates to hold back the hunger. He listened to Black Shawl’s daughter cough and moan for seven weeks, he rode through a two-foot blizzard into La Reine and nearly lost himself and seventy pounds of salted venison down a drifted ravine, he dug eleven graves in the frozen ground, and when the clouds broke and the snow began dissolving into the gray prairie, he went back to Commander Martin’s office and renegotiated the terms of the Canadian government’s generosity. Rains Fall and his people will have what they need to survive the last year of the century, and Charles—Charles stayed as long as he could, and he knows it will never be enough. But he has another path to follow, and it won’t wait any longer. 

He picks up the rabbit’s carcass and ties it to his saddle; he’s got a way to go before he can make camp. The wind is picking up, and if he and Taima can keep their strength up for another hour, they’ll be out of the high peaks and out of the territory of the wolf. 

Riding over this country again is strange. Unexpected. Charles never meant to stay in Canada, but equally he never meant to come back this way. He winds his way through Granite Pass, makes camp in Calumet Ravine just north of the old Wapiti reservation, stews the rabbit, ignores the ghosts. 

The next day takes him back above timberline, across endless snowy plains without a rider in sight. That’s the way Charles wants it. He knows there’s an easier path, closer to the railroad, closer to the state line, but even since he crossed the border from Canada Charles has kept a studied distance from busy roads. He’s made no friend of the U.S. government, nor the state of Ambarino, nor the settlers of New Hanover. Better to put his faith in never being seen than to trust in the goodness of other men. He moves slowly, guides Taima on foot when the terrain’s too rocky, and trusts the tundra to swallow them up. 

He cuts south the next morning, though, crossing under the railroad tracks just past the state line and steering Taima down along the banks of the Kamassa River. The temperature climbs as they drop from the mountains down to the muddy river, and Charles pauses to strip off his coat and stow it behind the saddle. Winter in Roanoke Valley is more clammy than cold, and as Charles follows the river he thinks to himself that this might be the only corner of the country he truly can’t find any beauty in. A part of him wishes, more than ever, that he hadn’t come. 

He crosses the Kamassa in a spitting fog. Beaver Hollow is just above him, a minute’s laborious walk uphill through spiny undergrowth. At the top, he pauses to breathe. 

He doesn’t know what he expected, but it’s still there, under the spring mud. If he hadn’t been here five months ago, he’d probably think nothing of it—an old camp left behind by sloppy pioneers—but he can see what isn’t here as clearly as if it had never been erased. There’s a stamped-out fireplace under his feet, and the cave mouth gapes around the invisible canopy of Dutch’s tent. Charles thinks, if he listens hard enough, he can hear Javier’s guitar. 

There’s just one tent left standing. And of course, Charles thinks. No matter what he said—no matter what Charles saw in his eyes, those last short desperate days before he headed north, Arthur was the one who could never really leave. So it’s his tent, and the munitions wagon he maintained with such steadfast, dogged care, toppled by the wind and rotting slowly in the dank earth, that remains of the camp where Charles saw his faith in good men die. 

He approaches slowly, as though something’s pushing him back, as if there’s someone here who doesn’t want him to see. Kneeling in the mud, he lifts the sodden edge of the canvas and pokes a stick into the mingled twigs and mud underneath. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, but then the stick connects with something hard, and he fishes it out.

It’s a glass jar, somehow intact underneath the wreckage, and Charles feels his heart seize up in his chest. It’s the bitterroot flower Arthur kept by his bed. Charles remembers seeing it a hundred times, in every camp, set out with Arthur’s cigarettes and news clippings and the photographs of faces Charles didn’t know. He never asked Arthur about it. Doesn’t know what it meant to him. But he knows what it means, which is what he already knew. It means that Arthur didn’t get away. 

The glass is cracked a little on one side, but the flower inside hasn’t wilted. Charles pulls the sleeve of his shirt down over his hand and carefully wipes away the dirt and the snowmelt, and tucks the jar away into his bag. Sifting through the rest of the rubble, he comes up empty—if anything else was left, it’s long since been snatched or disintegrated into the soggy, unforgiving earth. 

He finds Miss Grimshaw on the other side of camp. She’s more bones than anything, but Charles recognizes the huge cameo resting in her ribcage and thinks he can imagine what happened, even if he isn’t sure who actually pulled the trigger. She was another, he thinks, who was never going to get away. 

He walks the length and breadth of the invisible camp looking for Arthur. The ground’s level and unbroken on the south side of the clearing, but Charles stomps for an hour through the nodding ferns on the hillside until he’s sure there’s nothing to find. As the sun draws closer to the horizon, he lights a lantern and steps inside the stinking cave, following each twist and channel and bracing himself as he approaches each dark corner. But he finds nothing—only animal bones and rotting crates, everything picked clean, everything too old to tell the story Charles is reading the land for. When he emerges from the cave, night’s fallen. 

He doesn’t want to spend the night here. Instead, he gathers Miss Grimshaw’s bones in the canvas from Arthur’s tent, mounts Taima, and crosses back over the Kamassa. He digs a grave on a steep bluff at the river’s edge, and lays her to rest there high above the water. As a half moon circles the sky, he makes his way back down the ridge and over the water once more towards Van Horn. 

In the days that follow, Charles sinks deeper into the feeling that he has no idea what he’s doing in this country. He spends a night over the Van Horn post office and plays blackjack with a ring of ugly men at the Old Light, which is where he learns that a loudmouthed bitch and a fellow with a nasty cough shot the place up last summer. Someone who smells powerfully of vomit shows him the bullet holes in the porch outside, belches in Charles’s face and says _I heard them government boys chased em all the way through the Grizzlies_. And the next morning, his head throbbing, Charles is crossing state lines again, taking back roads up to Emerald Station, where he sits on the train platform with a pair of Polish farmhands who remember hearing tell of a shootout up north around that time. 

“That weren’t last summer, Simon,” Anton says, his weathered hands sifting the wooden dominoes between them. They’re four rounds into the game, and Charles is losing. 

“Yes, it were,” Simon objects; “because Lena had her pains that morning, and it was the doctor who told us, as he was coming down from that-a-way.” Simon’s mustache muffles his voice ever so slightly, softening each syllable as he talks. Anton, who has finished mixing the tiles, shrugs off the controversy and begins to draw his share. 

“From where?” Charles inquires, setting his tiles in the rack, studying the pips and trying to be patient as Simon humphs and sucks on his teeth and lays down double-six. 

“The doctor?” Simon asks, finally, as though having cleared his tile he’s remembering the question. “Up about Cotorra Springs, I think. It’s a long journey, but he’s the only fellow in the region as understands Lena’s troubles.” He draws a deep sigh, picks a tile from the boneyard, and sets it dolefully on the table. “A woman of suffering, my Lena,” he says, and Anton nods in grim confirmation, his eyes trained on the game. 

“Cotorra Springs,” Charles says, “that’s where the fighting was?” 

Simon, evidently a little disgruntled at Charles’s disregard for his woman of suffering, shakes his head. “The fighting? Not exactly, I reckon—Moonstone Pond, was it, Anton?” 

Anton grunts. 

“Moonstone Pond,” Charles repeats, and Simon nods in satisfaction, setting double-five next to Charles’s last tile and proudly counting up his points. Charles thanks him and Anton, sets the money he owes them on the table, and turns north. 

At Moonstone Pond, a pair of grubby children squabble for several minutes about who shot who before it becomes abundantly clear they don’t remember anything. Charles skirts the lake, paces on the shoreline looking for spent casings or trees pockmarked with bullets, looking for any trace of a fight, and can’t find anything. Farther north, near the rail line, there’s a man with a red beard who says he remembers a great to-do around the time Charles is asking about—men in suits riding fast after something or someone, though he never learned who. His neighbor, a day west and a mile dumber, remembers a wolf attack last spring. Charles thanks them all and carries on, scanning the land for answers and wondering why he’s still here asking questions that lead from one nowhere to the next. 

He’s fucked other men before. It’s not something he talks about; why would he, but it’s true. He’s fucked men in bars and in hotels and in dark barns from here to the Atlantic, and when he met Arthur Morgan he knew he’d fuck him too, and he did, and that was all. He’s fucked men and he’s watched them die. Neither thing is new, and yet here is Charles, a year out from the last time he and Arthur Morgan touched, sitting by a campfire in the goddamn southern Grizzlies, aching in ways he didn’t know he could and unable to stop dreaming about Arthur’s hands; about his eyes; his sweet, stupid mouth. Unable to say goodbye until he _knows_. 

Two days later, he thinks about Arthur as he walks up to a cabin in the clearing between two peaks and finds a man—finally—who knows what he’s talking about. 

He’s an ugly hog of a fellow, dressed in fringed leather and leaning on the birch railing of his house, squinting over wiry gray whiskers at Charles as he approaches. There’s a well-stripped boar carcass hanging in the yard outside, and Charles can see flecks of blood on the man’s hands and clothes. 

“You mean the van der Linde mess,” he says instantly when Charles asks his question, and Charles sees his hand drop to his gun belt. It doesn’t bother him. Mountain folk, Charles knows, don’t trust him any more than he trusts them. He appreciates the mutual understanding. 

“I do,” Charles says. 

The man nods. “You working for the government?” 

Charles almost smiles. “No.” 

Another nod. The man spits an approving stream of tobacco juice over the side of the porch railing that separates them. Not working for the government is good in these parts. 

“Heard tell,” the man says, “they killed two more of his men south of here. High peaks this side of Donner Falls.” His eyes narrow. “You ride with them? I heard they took on darkies to do their dirty work.” 

“I wouldn’t know,” Charles says, and thanks him. 

As he nears the peaks, Charles begins to feel, for the first time in his whole search, lucky. This early in the year, the ground this far north is usually blanketed in snow, but in the last few days a hot thaw has broken through the mantle, exposing rock and earth and the silent record preserved under the winter’s cover. He breaks off the main path and begins scaling sharp rises, following instinct and guess as much as anything, wandering in search of a sign that he’s retracing the right steps. 

He searches for twelve days. For twelve days, with his heart thundering in his chest and voices in his head, he chases ghosts in the mountains. He finds a shower of bullet casings on a sloping rock face, a trampled pool of melting snow and blood on a broad, flowered ledge, a fragment of black denim snagged on a granite outcropping, and nothing, nothing at all, in the shape of closure. On the thirteenth morning, he wakes up to snow. 

It’s not a gentle drifting. The sky is black and sour above Charles’s head when he crawls out of his tent; already, the ground is thick with ice, and he can hear the wind gathering to the north. He pulls his hat down over his eyes, wraps his coat tighter, and walks to the edge of the cliff, peering out into the angry emptiness below. Behind him, Taima whinnies. She knows before he does that it’s over. 

“I’m sorry, Arthur,” Charles whispers. The wind takes his voice out of his mouth and drowns it in the storm. 

  
  


**Arthur - 1900**

_Mr. Fredson Bowers II is a strange young man. After spending some weeks in his company I can surely say that I do not understand him. He says that he is a rancher and the son of a rancher yet he dresses like a dandy banker and his horse is the sorriest animal I have ever laid eyes on. He says that he bought her off a fellow in Comstock, a mining town some way north of here in the Sagehens, and got a very good price; I told him the price was so good because the poor creature is half dead. But I was able to find the ingredients for a tonic that has done her some good, so we may see improvement._

_We are now settled in at Bowers Ranch after a long journey which I fear I prolonged. The fever has broken and Mr. Bowers says there is a good doctor living nearby who has had some success in treating conditions like mine. He offered to lend me money, but something about that turns my stomach. I told him he can keep his money and will need it to get his place in working order anyway. He seemed hurt but I guess we both will live. Since coming south I have been able to breathe a little easier so maybe that doctor in St. Denis was right all along._

_I don’t know if this is what Charles meant by a chance at something better. Seems like I am the same man I ever was._

  
  


**Arthur - 1901**

“This is morphine,” the doctor says as he eases the needle into Arthur’s arm. “One eighth of a grain.” 

Dr. Floyd Robinson’s office smells of alcohol and cedar. From where he’s lying, propped awkwardly on a pillow to tilt his rib cage towards the low pine ceiling, all Arthur can see is a wall of glass vials, stacks of cotton bandage and steel instruments Arthur doesn’t want to imagine digging into a human body. A body like his, which is currently half-naked and shaken with fever and curling instinctively away from the glass and rubber apparatus Dr. Robinson’s prepping behind him. 

Arthur closes his eyes, and tries, with his laboring breath, to think about something else. 

What’s about to happen is exactly, Arthur reflects, what he was trying to avoid. In the year since he came west, his cough seemed to improve. For a while after he joined Fred Bowers on the ranch, the night sweats stopped and his appetite came back and it seemed, last summer, as though the boosters’ stories of desert cures were true. With the strength he gained back, he’s helped Bowers rebuild the ranch. With difficulty, he’s redirected the man’s attention from avenging his murdered parents towards making something out of what they left him, and this spring, they bought a thousand Katahdin sheep, and since then Arthur has stayed busy keeping the dumb things—Bowers’s pride and joy—alive. 

He first noticed the cough getting worse at the end of August. At first it was just a roughness at the back of his throat, an ache in his chest, and then it was like living the past over again. This time, the pain’s weighted on his right side, clustered around his heart, and the fever is constant. He wakes every night with his shirt stuck to him, and he rides out under the bright western sun with a chill so deep under his crawling skin that it seems he’ll never warm up. But he’s found that if he keeps a flask in his pocket and a bottle of laudanum close by, it’s possible, if nothing else, to still the cough a little and dull the pain in his chest, and in this way he’s made it through the season. 

It was last week, bringing the herd back in from the valley, that things got worse. Arthur barely remembers setting out, his collar already soaked with sweat, shaking a little as he mounted up. Bowers asked if he was all right, and Arthur knows in retrospect that he should have stayed back, but herding’s easy work. It was the yelling that did it, he thinks—one minute he was shouting at the dumb, wooly beasts to get along, the next he was on the ground with darkness seeping in and out at the corners of his vision and blood bubbling out of his mouth too fast to answer Bowers’s frantic questions. He could hear Charles in his head, cool and calm: _Oh, Arthur. Any day we can die, mmm?_

He didn’t die. He never seems to. Bowers pulled him up while Arthur coughed and spat out the last of the blood, and together they rode back to the main house. Arthur thinks he slept, or did something like it, but he isn’t sure how long, only that the sun was up when he lay down and down when he woke drowning, and up again when Fred Bowers, against his best objections, led him down the steps of the ranch house and into the wagon. He remembers every minute of the ride to Dr. Robinson’s office north of Las Praderas, with his chest aching and each rock on the highway rattling loose another wet, painful cough. 

He’s been at Robinson’s for a week now, sleeping in a little house off the main building with another fellow nearly as sick as Arthur. It’s not quite a hospital, but there’s a nurse who comes round during the day and another at night, with meals Arthur hasn’t been able to choke down and water that never seems to wash away the heat gathered under his skin. On the second night, he learns that they’re old Robinson’s wife and daughter. 

The tuberculosis, Arthur is not surprised to learn, has progressed. It’s in his right lung, worse than ever. Dr. Robinson was careful not to promise too much, but he says he’s been seeing results from something called pneumothorax, which, as Arthur understands it, means popping the sick lung like a pig’s bladder and hoping it heals on its own. It sounds doubtful at best, but Dr. Robinson is optimistic, and, when he saw that Arthur didn’t share his enthusiasm for the idea of a great fucking needle in between his ribs, pointed out that at this point, Arthur has a choice between an uncertain cure and a very, very certain death. 

So he’s spread out now on Dr. Robinson’s surgical table, feeling the soft cloud of morphine dilute the panic in his chest a little while the good doctor paints a patch of iodine on his back. He feels the doctor’s fingers prodding at him, wiggling to find purchase between his ribs; he can’t help the cough that shakes loose. Robinson waits for that to subside, and then announces that he’s going to give Arthur an injection of novocain. 

Arthur feels the needle puncture his skin, then work itself deep into tissue and muscle, and thinks that he’d rather the doctor just stab him. He’s been stabbed before, and while it’s nothing he’s ever sought out, it was quick and felt more like a punch than what it was. This—slow, deliberate, and in a room so quiet Arthur’s sure he can _hear_ the glass point of the needle tearing through each layer of his back—this is far, far worse. 

“Relax, Mr. Morgan,” Dr. Robinson says. 

“I am relaxin’,” Arthur objects. Dr. Robinson chuckles. 

“Introducing the gas now.” 

Arthur feels the tubing wriggle into him, through the numbed upper layer of his skin and into the tight, agonizing center of his chest. It’s the strangest feeling—like being eaten alive by a determined rubber worm. Then the worm stops, and at first Arthur wonders if it’s working, or if the doctor’s found that Arthur’s lung is too sick, too clotted with blood and sputum and scar tissue to even give against the bottle of air he’s forcing in through the winding tube. Then he feels a sharp, crushing pain, muted only a little by the morphine, and the oddest sensation, as though a bubble is swelling against his heart, ready to burst. 

He lies there for what feels like hours, listening to the odd, muffled hiss of the bubble expanding in his chest, wondering if he’ll pop or if his heart will just give out against the pressure. Then Robinson’s pulling out the tube, taping up the place where it went in, and helping Arthur sit upright again. The bubble shifts as he moves, squirming alarmingly against his heart; Arthur can _hear_ it clicking along with his increasingly rapid pulse. 

“You did fine,” Dr. Robinson tells him, and Mrs. Robinson arrives to usher him back to bed. 

He sleeps for a week. It’s only when he wakes up on the seventh day, so ravenous he feels almost nauseated and more conscious than he thinks he’s been in months, that he realizes his cough is gone. Miss Robinson brings a plate of bread and beans, and Arthur eats like it’s the last meal he’s ever going to see. By the end of the day, he’s on his feet. 

Bowers comes to visit the following week, and Arthur’s struck by a surprising wave of something like fondness at the sight of his round, nervous face and his silly mustache. They sit on the porch behind the main house together, shaded from the desert sun. 

“You look well,” Bowers says, evidently relieved. 

Arthur nods. “Doc’s bubble trick works like a dream, I reckon.” He takes a breath by way of demonstration, and savors the unfamiliar sensation of ease. Bowers beams. 

“I’m glad to hear it,” he says. “It’s been hard, I’ll tell you, keeping things running without you.” 

“Me?” Arthur’s startled. “I weren’t hardly pullin’ my own weight, not like this. Ain’t you got Winters and Mickey, and those French fellas we found to help with the shearing, ain’t they helpin’ out?” 

Bowers shakes his head. “Yes, yes, there’s plenty of labor to go around, I’m grateful for that. It’s just—” he hesitates, biting his lip. “It’s the money.” Arthur can see his fingers twitching at the clasp of his valise.  
  
“The money?” 

“You know—” He dips into the bag and pulls out a wad of paper, holding the pages out to Arthur. “All the bills, I’ve been trying to keep up, but it all goes out of my head, and I get the wrong numbers, I tried to figure up how much feed to order for the winter and it came out to a hundred thousand dollars and I know that can’t be right, but I don’t—” 

“All right, all right,” Arthur says, taking the bills from Bowers and squinting at the pages. He’s seen Bowers get like this before; it reminds him, in a way, of John as a kid, huffing and puffing over a word he couldn’t understand in one of Dutch’s books. 

They work through each bill together as the sun crawls across the sky. Arthur helps Bowers add up his debts and his credits, and they calculate the price of winter feed for the flocks, which to Bowers’s pitiful relief comes in well under a hundred thousand dollars. By suppertime, Arthur’s set the ranch’s financial affairs more or less in order, and when Bowers sets out he thanks him so effusively that Arthur, again, is shocked to see how much he appears to mean to the man. He never expected, he realizes, to matter very much to anyone ever again. 

Over the weeks that follow, Dr. Robinson re-collapses Arthur’s bad lung twenty times, and Bowers comes to visit whenever he can, bearing bills and catalogs and word of how his favorite sheep are faring and reassurances that Arthur’s horse is eating well and hasn’t taken to anyone else. During the day, Arthur does light chores around the farm that Dr. Robinson says won’t hurt his condition—carrying water, feeding the incessantly chattering chickens—and at night, he sits under the stars and writes in the journal he asked Bowers to bring up from the ranch on one of his visits. 

He thinks often about Dutch, on those quiet nights, and always pushes the thought away: even after two years, Dutch is a new scar, stubbornly fresh and impossible to get a grasp on without more pain than Arthur can stand. He thinks about John, about Abigail and Jack, and the uncertainty that surrounds them threatens to overwhelm him. Every memory from his life before carries such a burden of guilt and confusion that Arthur sometimes thinks it would be better if he had died—if that story had simply ended, instead of leaving him here with questions he’ll never be able to answer and wrongs he’ll never be able to right. 

It’s Charles, somehow, who occupies more and more of Arthur’s thoughts at night. Charles, with his soft voice and his strong shoulders; Charles, who’s in Canada now doing a better deed than anything Arthur’s ever attempted; Charles, who lit a fire in Arthur he’s never felt with anyone else, something hot and secret that burned so bright Arthur sometimes thought it might consume him altogether. Thinking of Charles hurts, like everything does, but it’s also sweet, and warm in a way that Arthur can’t explain. As he spends the winter filling the pages of his little notebook, he finds that half his idle drawings seem to end up shaped like Charles. 

_You got the chance to do something better_ , Charles whispers to him, and Arthur wants to ask him what it was that told Charles there was better in him. 

Better or not, with every day Arthur feels a little of his old strength returning, and by February Dr. Robinson announces that he’s ready to be discharged. Bowers comes up from the ranch to meet him, and Arthur packs his shaving kit and the tonics the doctor gives him and the little sheaf of sketches he’s produced in his time here, and readies himself to set off. 

“It’s a second chance, son,” Dr. Robinson says as he shakes Arthur’s hand. “Not many people get that.” 

_You’re a lucky man, Arthur. Any day we can die._

Arthur nods. “I mean to make it count.” 

  
  


**Charles - 1901**

On September 12 of the year 1901, the governor of Lemoyne introduces into the legislature a new bill to prevent fighting by agreement anywhere within state borders, with violations punishable by up to ten years in Sisika Penitentiary and a fine of no less than one thousand dollars. Charles, who learns about the bill from one of the guards at the Saint Denis jailhouse, is flattered. 

“Real shame,” the guard says, passing the _Daily Crescent_ through the bars and lighting a cigar. “I had money on you.” 

“I’m sorry,” Charles says. 

Charles reads the _Crescent_ front to back, then back to front again, and watches the afternoon sun crawl across the jailhouse wall. He bums a cigarette off a constable, wishes he could bribe his way into a bath. The shirt he managed to grab in the ruckus when the police broke up the match behind Doyle’s tavern is clean, but Charles can feel the old sweat and dried blood caked into his hair and across the side of his face where Clifford caught him off guard in the first round. He’d give a lot, right now, for a few minutes with a tub of water. 

This isn’t the first time he’s landed in a cell in the five months he’s spent around Saint Denis. How and why he got here, he isn’t quite sure, only that after he gave up searching for Arthur’s body he came south, looking for familiar ground or maybe just for a little warmth, maybe hoping in spite of himself that sticking to ground he traveled with Arthur meant a ghost of a chance that he might find something like closure. That hasn’t happened. Whatever his reason for coming here, he stayed to fight after a fellow in a saloon even grimier than Doyle’s bet his friend twenty dollars he couldn’t last a round against the big Negro at the bar. Charles, with ten beers in him and very close to nothing to lose, knocked the friend out, took the twenty dollars, and decided there were worse ways to pay for his beer. 

This isn’t the way Charles is accustomed to making money, but he has to admit there’s a certain appeal to it. Fighting clears his head. He’d like to say it’s the chance to prove his manhood every time he faces a white man, to square off against centuries of colonization and legislation and scientific discourse and assert a righteous supremacy with his own body, or even the pure love of the fistic arts, but really, it’s that he wants to hit and get hit. He’s been carrying an ache in his chest for going on two years now, and when he’s beaten and bruised and throwing the sum of himself into a fight, the ache gets easier to forget. Winning or losing doesn’t matter as much, but Charles happens to win more than he loses, and in the past five months he’s gone from wrestling drunks in alleys to fighting Gentleman Joseph Clifford, reigning heavyweight champion. Champion still, Charles thinks, thanks to the Saint Denis Police Department and Governor Blanchard. 

“Smith!” 

It’s the lieutenant’s voice; Charles forgets about the championship and sits up a little straighter. Lieutenant Williams comes around the corner, the expression behind his whiskers inscrutable. “Someone here to see you.” 

The man who emerges from behind Williams is short and tanned and clean shaven, dressed in a snappy tailored suit a few years out of style and chewing languidly at a wad of tobacco. Charles thinks he recognizes his face, but can’t recall where from. The man pulls out a lacquered cigarette case and reaches through the bars to offer it up to Charles. 

“Thank you,” Charles says, accepting the man’s match. 

“Fred Vaughn,” Fred Vaughn returns in acknowledgment _._

“Charles Smith.” 

“I know,” Vaughn says. He leans back slightly, as if taking the measure of Charles, who feels he’s probably looked better than he does right now, hunkered down on a jail cot with a black eye and smelling like a pig. Vaughn, though, just nods; seems to like what he sees. “Been hearing a lot about you. Heard about your bout with Joe Clifford this morning.” 

“Yeah?” Charles asks.

“Heard you shaped up pretty well against him.”

“Maybe.” 

“What are you, one eighty? One-seventy-five?”

“About that,” Charles says. 

Vaughn nods again, leans over to spit a long brown jet into the spitoon by the cell door, and straightens up to face Charles. “Interested in making some real money?” he asks. 

Charles looks up. “What kind of money we talking about?” he asks, even though it’s never been about the money. Charles can fill his belly just fine with a bow and a knife; he’s sleeping rough whether he wins or loses. Still, it seems like the thing to ask. 

“Two thousand,” Vaughn says. Charles, who fought Joe Clifford this morning for a five hundred dollar purse and felt damn lucky, lifts his chin. 

“Two _thousand_? Who’s paying?” 

Vaughn shakes his head, grinning suddenly. Charles isn’t sure he likes what it does to his face. “That’s my business, Lone Wolf,” he says. “Yours is deciding if two thousand is your business.” 

Charles thinks about it, and realizes that there’s nothing to think about. “I suppose it is.” 

“Good,” Vaughn says, and without further ceremony walks over to the chief’s desk, where Lieutenant Williams is waiting. Charles watches Vaughn exchange a few quick words with Williams and pull a stack of bills from his pocket, several of which make their way directly into the lieutenant’s pocket. The transaction complete, Williams makes his way to Charles with a key and a bland expression of innocence. 

“You’re free to go,” he says, and Charles thanks him. 

Vaughn is waiting on the street by the entrance to the station, chewing thoughtfully at his tobacco and squinting into the afternoon sun.

“Getting awfully cramped in this city,” he remarks, as Charles steps out into the sun and settles his bag over his shoulder. 

“Sure,” Charles says. 

“You ever been to New Austin?” Vaughn asks. 

“Once.”

“Beautiful country,” Vaughn says. “Great open spaces, you know, big sky, all the room a man could ask for. And the governor, wouldn’t you know, he’s a man with a real appreciation for the pugilistic arts. Real wonderful country out there.” 

Charles nods. “Just tell me where and when.” 

“Armadillo,” Vaughn says. “End of the month. Get there by the 29th and wait for instructions.” He steps off the curb onto the waiting streetcar before Charles can ask any questions, and disappears down the boulevard. 

Charles sets out for New Austin that evening. He’s got nothing keeping him in Lemoyne, nothing but a memory, and that he can carry anywhere. Whether he likes it or not, he thinks. As he winds through the swamps surrounding Saint Denis in the last settling light of dusk, he’s swarmed by memory. Sadie Adler, grimly piloting a wagon full of women up this road towards Lakay and the possibility of hope; Dutch, stalking towards town lit up with arrogance and genius and greed. He hears the forest rumble and hum as night falls, hot and dense, and thinks about Arthur. 

  
  


**Arthur — 1899**

Kieran Duffy—dumb, stupid, never-here-nor-there, sweet natured Kieran Duffy who loved horses more than people—is not the first person Arthur has seen killed. Hell, he’s not the first Arthur’s seen taken apart, unfortunately enough for him and all those others. So Arthur doesn’t know why he’s still got a chill all these hours later, when he and Charles meet in the dark in the shack at the edge of the swamp. 

Arthur gets there first. For a long time—maybe twenty minutes, maybe an hour—he leans on the railing over the water, smoking cigarette after cigarette, watching the muted shadows of catfish bob and bubble across the surface of the swamp. The Milky Way is overhead, feeling closer than usual somehow, as though the heavens are bending especially close to earth tonight, watching. Arthur feels watched, anyhow. 

When Charles arrives, there’s a moment or two that always happens whenever they’re alone like this, when Arthur’s not sure what to say, or how to start. He’s acutely aware, in those moments, of every part and angle of Charles’s body, of the heat and weight of him, each breath, each movement, every single thing that is _Charles_ that Arthur isn’t touching yet. Arthur can only make him out in silhouette—his hair swept back over one broad shoulder, his sleeves rolled back to the elbow, shirt open to the night air—but it’s enough. 

“Hot night,” Arthur says, and Charles hums assent. 

“Don’t think I could sleep in this if I tried.”

Arthur grunts, and offers him a cigarette. Charles accepts, and for a few moments they share the silence, breathing deep and letting the day’s chaos roll off them into the waiting swamp. 

It’s Charles who finishes first, flicks his cigarette out into the darkness over the railing, and steps towards Arthur, putting a strong hand down Arthur’s pants before Arthur’s done taking his last drag. Charles wraps his hand around Arthur’s cock and toys with it, almost lazy; he’s taking his time, enjoying himself while Arthur hisses and tosses his cigarette into the mud and braces himself against the railing with one hand, groping at Charles’s shirt with the other, dizzy with his smell and the slow, maddening movement of his hand. 

Charles jerks Arthur to full hardness and then pulls his hand away, sliding it up to cup Arthur’s jaw, and Arthur feels the question in his touch. He nods, almost panting, hungry and thirsty and run through with adrenaline, and drops to his knees on the rough boards. He puts his mouth to Charles’s crotch and breathes in the heat, wrapping his hand around one of Charles’s thick thighs while Charles unbuttons his pants, and then he’s taking Charles’s cock in his mouth, and what follows is hot and sticky and breathless, as Charles rocks his hips against Arthur’s face and Arthur chokes and swallows and grinds hard against his own hand till Charles’s fingers tighten in his hair and tug twice, a third time, so sharply Arthur feels a bright spark of pain that lights and mingles with the fire running up and down the length of him. 

Charles spills on Arthur’s cheek, gets a little on his shirt and on his hand, and a few seconds later Arthur follows, with a noise so involuntary and so loud that Charles puts a hand over his mouth while Arthur bucks against him. For a few minutes, they stay braced against each other, panting, flushed, vibrating with tension pent up and let loose. Then Arthur wipes a hand across his cheek and makes a little noise of disgust, and Charles laughs—the prettiest sound Arthur knows—and pulls his handkerchief out. 

“My apologies, Mr. Morgan,” he says, and if something about that don’t get Arthur just a little hard again, even this soon after. He wipes himself down, passes the handkerchief back to Charles, and buttons himself up, feeling the muscles down his back unwinding for the first time in weeks. It ain’t perfect, but it feels a little as if Charles reached into his chest and snapped a couple of the knots keeping him twisted up inside. 

They don’t talk much when they do this; from the first time, they never have. Arthur likes it, the simplicity of the thing, the peace of it when it’s just them two in the dark together. They share another cigarette, passing the spark back and forth as the night trills around them and Charles buttons his pants. In a few hours, it’ll be light again; Arthur can guess that some of the gang are already awake. He guesses Dutch probably never went to sleep at all. For now, it’s enough to sit in the dark, with the taste of Charles in his mouth. 

Before he stands to leave, Charles kisses Arthur once, lightly, on the cheek, and then again on his lips. He turns without a word, dissolving into the shade of the mossy oaks between Arthur and the distant lights of camp. 

  
  


**Charles — 1901**

Charles rides into Armadillo on the last day of the month, sore from the road and blistered by the naked desert sun and aching for another fight. He finds a town like a fly stamped on the dry face of the land, dwarfed by the vast open sky and sand on every side. He finds that every person in this fly on the face of the desert knows his name. 

Fred Vaughn has been busy in the weeks Charles spent crossing the Heartlands and the Great Plains. Without a single poster or so much as a line in the _Blackwater Ledger_ , everyone Charles meets in Armadillo is talking about the fight, although no one can agree on just where it’s meant to be. The bartender who serves Charles when he first rides in says it’ll be out by the hanging tree near the bluffs north of town; another fellow at the bar interrupts to say no, it’ll be in Pike’s Basin. Later in the week, Charles hears a rumor that the governor is under pressure from certain business interests to come down hard on prizefighting, and that the _real_ fight will be over the border in Escalera; that Charles and Gentleman Joe Clifford are going to be smuggled over in a wagon with their faces covered; that the president of Nuevo Paraiso will be in attendance at the ringside. Charles, who hasn’t seen Vaughn since he got to New Austin, wonders if anyone’s right. 

It’s not just the location of the fight that’s big news in New Austin; it’s Charles. Lone Wolf, he hears, is a savage killer, raised by _actual_ wolves in Ambarino. He’s got wolf blood in his veins; he’s Nat Turner’s grandson; he learned to kill from the bloodthirsty Wapiti warriors who murdered General Spooner back in 1890. Lone Wolf, in the ring against Gentleman Joe, is going to settle once and for all the question of racial superiority. Or, failing that, give everyone a gory goddamn show. 

“Oughta be disqualified,” Charles hears through the hubbub of Armadillo’s only saloon as he leans against the bar, enjoying the dull buzz of whiskey making him stupider by the minute. He turns around; there’s a gray-faced rancher in the corner by the piano, eyeing Charles across the smoky room. 

“Nah,” his companion’s saying, a big man with a straggle of blond hair. “I wanna see it. Ain’t no different from a bullfight, and that’s good clean entertainment.” 

“That ain’t a fair fight,” the rancher spits back, eyes still locked with Charles. “Ain’t no such thing as a fair fight with an Indian. Ain’t no kind of fair fight with a damn mutt.” 

Charles waves the bartender over and pays for another shot. He’s enjoying himself. 

He’s enjoying himself less in the morning when he rolls over in the blistering sunlight and feels his head crack open with pain. He hauls himself up, staggers through the harsh morning heat to a clump of sagebrush a few yards from his tent, and vomits. Stands bent double with his hands on his knees for a few minutes, spitting bile into the dry sage and waiting for the pitch of the earth to stabilize. 

He’s standing there still when a kid rides up, standing up in the saddle to peer at Charles as his horse stops short by the coals of Charles’s campfire. 

“Morning, mister,” he calls. 

“Yeah,” is what Charles manages. 

“Fred Vaughn sent me,” the kid continues, scratching at his bumpy chin. “He’s waiting at the saloon. Says he needs to talk to you.” 

“I’ll come,” Charles says. 

“Said to tell you you’re fighting soon.” 

“Thanks,” Charles says, straightening up from his crouch finally. Sunlight sends a burst of pain through his skull. The kid surveys him with evident skepticism, nods, and turns his horse back towards town. 

Charles heads to the campfire as the kid rides off, stirs the coals and sets about making a pot of coffee. He remembers the way Hosea made it the morning after a party, strong enough to take paint off iron; remembers Arthur gulping it by the cup, bent over the table with his hat tipped forward to block out the sun. 

He’s thought before that if he could do what Arthur could do, he’d draw all these memories, the ones that float up unexpected like burnt paper from a fire. Put them on a page. Something he could hold. He thinks, as he drinks four cups of coffee, hot enough to scald his mouth, that that would be one he’d draw—Arthur with his hat over his face, his bowed shoulders soft and sweet in the morning light. He tries to stop thinking about that. 

He finds Fred Vaughn at a central table in the saloon, wearing the same suit he wore when Charles met him but with a bigger, brighter bowtie. His face is as impassive as ever, but Charles thinks he detects a pinch in Vaughn’s brow, a little shadow under each eye. He won’t say where the fight’s going to happen, but it won’t be against Clifford.

“Gentleman Joe,” he announces, “has elected to pursue a career in motion pictures.” He takes his hat and puts it on the table, lights a thin cigar, and blows a puff of smoke towards the rough beams above them. 

“He’s an actor?” Charles asks.  
  


“No.” Vaughn flicks ash onto the floor, squints across the room, and says, “You’ll be fighting Tommy Kaplan instead, the Jew.” Charles, who doesn’t much care who he’s fighting if there’s two thousand on the line, nods and takes a sip of his beer.

Vaughn rolls along, spreading his neat fingers over the table’s scummy surface as he lays out the situation. “The governor’s getting cold feet,” he says. “Getting pressure from Washington to come down hard on vice, come down hard on Armadillo. Folks back East don’t think much of frontier towns like this,” he says, with an encompassing gesture at the bar, the pair of farmhands arguing over dice in the corner, the girls draped over the railing in the cloud of smoke above them. 

“I can imagine,” Charles says. 

“Can you read, Mr. Smith?” Vaughn asks. It’s a genuine enough question. It strikes Charles that almost everything about Fred Vaughn is genuine, except what he’s got a financial incentive to make otherwise. 

“Yes.”

“Well then, you read the papers. You know what they think of this country back east. Of the people who choose to live out here. Civilization’s hellbent on making an honest living a thing of the past.” Vaughn swats at a fat fly droning around his head. “Folks like to see a good fight, Mr. Smith. And that’s what I aim to give them. _You_ —” he jabs a finger at Charles, his gaze suddenly hard as iron— “you are a problem.”

“Am I,” Charles asks evenly. He supposes that’s nothing new. 

“I want a clean fight.” 

“I always fight clean.”

“Not from what I’ve heard, you don’t.”

Charles thinks about Joe Clifford’s sweaty cheekbone under his thumb, thinks about letting a stocky Italian pummel him almost out of consciousness for fifty dollars, thinks about the way his reason gives way in the ring to the ugly, frenzied thing he’s been carrying in his chest since the summer of 1899. He looks Fred Vaughn in the eye and thinks about how good it feels to let a man punch him till he can’t see. 

“Maybe you heard wrong,” he says. 

Vaughn stares at Charles for a long time, looking for something, maybe, or just waiting to see if Charles blinks. Charles can’t tell. Finally he sighs, rubs his hands together, and stands.

“Maybe,” he says, settling his bowler hat back on his head. He looks tired. “Be ready to fight this Monday.”

On Monday, an item in the _Blackwater Ledger_ announces a horse race at Rathskeller Fork, a MAJOR SPORTING EVENT to determine THE BEST OF THE RACE and promising THRILLS AND ENTERTAINMENT to all. A second, much smaller item on the following page announces a livestock sale at Ridgewood Farm, featuring one fine black mustang and one white Rhinelander. Charles, who rode up to the farm the night before after a note from Vaughn’s pimply teenage messenger, has to give the man points for creativity. 

In spite of all the secrecy and circumlocutions, there’s a fair crowd amassed around the hastily-built ring when Charles emerges from the barn. He was expecting mainly farmhands and ranchers and perhaps the odd cowboy, but half the men are wearing tailored suits; Charles can see at least twelve silk top hats. There’s even what he _thinks_ is a movie camera mounted high above the ring, ready to capture each frame of the fight with ultra-modern precision. Charles hopes it’ll be a good one. 

He eases through the shouting crowd and steps into his corner, eyeing Tommy Kaplan from across the ring. He’s easily a head taller than Charles, his weight laid out across a longer frame and his eyes set deep behind heavy brows. He’s not the leading man Joe Clifford was, but he looks like he means business. So does Charles. 

Sixty seconds into the first round, Charles feels Tommy Kaplan’s hand break against his shoulder; he hears the bone snap. They clinch; grapple; break away; Charles’s own breath is hot and loud in his head. In the second round, Kaplan comes in strong, landing blow after blow on Charles’s ribs, beating him relentlessly towards the hollering mass at his back. The bell rings; Charles heaves and swallows and blocks and lunges; an eagle screams overhead. 

In the third and fourth rounds Charles feels himself gaining an edge. There’s a heat building in the center of his body, fueling each punch. He watches his glove split Tommy Kaplan’s cheek open. Kaplan drops to one knee as the referee roars out the count. Charles sees blood dripping into the kicked-up dirt. On four, Kaplan leaps up again. 

Ten more rounds go by before Charles feels anything like fatigue. His body is carrying him, moving without any conscious direction on his part. It ducks, counters, bleeds, grinds against his opponent’s sweaty weight, and Charles watches from a bird’s-eye view. He hears the referee shouting a warning at him. There’s blood in his mouth. Kaplan’s fist slams against his heart and Charles feels packed dirt shred his face; feels the earth shake underneath him as men stamp and shout and clamor at each beat of the referee’s count. He drags one knee underneath him, pushes up with his fists, and leaves his blood in the dirt. 

Round fourteen; Kaplan is starting to flag. Charles can see it in his face, a mirror of what he feels in his own body. He lands an uppercut to Kaplan’s right cheek, watches him stumble back, and thinks it’s over. It must be. The champion’s about to fall, and Charles is about to take his place. 

But Kaplan isn’t going to go gently. He lunges forward, catches Charles in a clinch, grappling with every particle of strength left in his taut muscles. Everything about Tommy Kaplan is pressed up against Charles; wet, rancid breath and jostling bones and a low, wordless snarl worming out of his lungs and directly into Charles’s ear. All around them, the crowd whoops and chants and yells for Kaplan to finish him off. 

Something happens in Charles’s chest, the thing that happens five times out of ten in the last few rounds of a fight. It feels like a burst of poison gas, lit and exploding before he can contain it, sending fevered impulses to each limb. He twists in Kaplan’s grasp, thrashing wildly, raining loose, stupid punches on his skull and grinning wider every time he hears the glove connect; a flat, noisy thunderclap. He’s breathing harder now, too hard, too fast; he can feel the oxygen tearing at his lungs, feels like he’s breathing sand. He hears Kaplan grunt, hears the referee bawl _foul_ , and watches from above as he topples backwards, catches himself, steadies, and crumples under the fantastic weight of Tommy Kaplan’s gloved fist in the center of his chest. 

“ _One!_ ” the referee bawls. Charles breathes in dirt, swallows it. “ _Two!_ ”

With his eyes closed, spreadeagled in the dust, Charles can’t see the horizon. He feels it in his belly—twisting, spinning, upside down and rolling. 

“ _Three! Four! Five! Six!_ ” 

Charles attempts to pull himself up, and finds his arms and legs are wooden, splintering under the effort. The pain in his stomach is a cannonball, holding him down, spreading thick lead to the rest of his body. 

“ _Seven!_ ” 

A shadow passes over his body; cool air. He tries again to put weight onto his hands, and the ground slips out from under him. 

“ _Eight!_ ” 

The crowd’s in full pandemonium now, howling in delight and outrage. Charles feels the tremors of their exultation through the dirt. 

“ _Nine!_ ”

Charles’s heart is beating faster than it ever has before. It feels like the earth might open underneath his body and send him spilling into the stars. 

“ _TEN,_ ” the referee shouts, and bells are clanging and the crowd swarms the ring as somebody comes up behind Charles and drags his stupid body off. There’s a smear of blood in the dirt where he fell. 

There’s no time to recover. As Charles lurches towards the barn on the shoulder of a ranch hand, Fred Vaughn appears in the center of his hazy vision, reporting that federal marshals are on their way from Armadillo. Charles reaches the barn, staggers to a horse trough and plunges his head into the foul water, then reels upright and spits blood and mucus onto the ground. He hauls himself onto Taima’s waiting back and leans against her neck, urging her forward as the farm churns with chaos around him. 

He evades the marshals by dint of luck more than design. By the time he’s cleared Gaptooth Ridge, his right eye’s swollen completely shut, and he only has a sliver of cloudy vision in his left. Essentially, he’s riding blind. The world around him is a thick swirl of bloody cotton, muffled by the pain in his head and his belly and the sharp core of agony around his heart. He thinks the sun is setting when he finally slips off Taima’s back and staggers into the shadow of a tall cliff, pulling his bedroll down for cover against the clinging chill of the desert night. 

As the celestial hunter stalks the sky above him, Charles falls asleep and dreams of Arthur. 

  
  


**Charles - 1899**

Arthur is coughing. 

Charles noticed it when Arthur first turned up at Lakay, shaggy and sunburnt and gaunt. That first night, while Charles stood watch from the wraparound porch, he heard Arthur coughing, again and again and again with no end or resolution. Charles has heard coughing like that before. Charles heard Hosea, before the Saint Denis police did what Hosea’s cough never had a chance to do. And now Arthur is coughing. 

Charles asked if he’s all right, when they set out from Bluewater Marsh to find a new camp in Murfree country, but of course Arthur said yes. The rain followed them north, through the hills and into the dense forest above Butcher Creek, and Arthur leaned into his saddle and muffled his cough in his sleeve as they picked their way up the backbone of Roanoke Ridge. Charles tried asking, instead, about Guarma—about what happened to the ship that sailed without him—and Arthur said a little and left the rest unsaid, which leaves Charles wondering what’s so bad that Arthur can’t say it to him. 

They flush out the caves, blast the whole rabble of cannibal freaks apart, and find the girl cowering in a wooden cage at the back of the cavern, which is where the last of Charles’s already threadbare compunction over killing so many incestuous murderers dissipates. She’s petrified, of course, so wracked with fear Charles can see piss under her bare feet, but Arthur’s gentle—tender, even, the way he moves into the cage with her and catches her in his arms, stilling her panic in a firm hug. Charles, watching through the splintered bars, feels his chest twinge ferociously. 

Arthur puts the girl on his horse and rides off towards Annesburg, and Charles stays behind to clear away the bodies, dragging them one by one to the deepest part of the cave and building a loose pyre. It’s filthy work, ugly, disgusting work that makes Charles feel the weight of his own sins with each step he takes, and when it’s over and the bodies are burning, he jogs down the steep face of the hill towards the river, strips off his rancid shirt, and washes himself in the chilly waters. 

He’s coming up out of the water for the last time, spitting and scrubbing the ghost of grime out of his palms, when he hears Arthur up on the hill. He’s coughing. 

When Charles mounts the ridge, sodden shirt in his hands, he finds Arthur squatting in the mouth of the cave over the splintered beginnings of a campfire. He looks up at Charles, and Charles sees Arthur’s eyes tracing his bare chest, sees his throat working. For a long count, the world is Arthur’s eyes and Charles’s heart, pumping so hard he thinks each individual beat must carry across the clearing to where Arthur is. 

They’re kissing before he knows it, standing in the clammy entrance to the cave between drizzling night and the rude heat of the fire. It’s graceless, urgent; Arthur’s hands at his ears, cupping his jaw, insistent and clumsy and a little desperate. Charles can’t breathe, can’t stop, can’t feel anything but the deep, yawning need in his stomach that’s been growing ever since Arthur walked through the doors at Lakay, ruddy and anxious and completely, miraculously alive. He kisses Arthur till his mouth hurts. 

“Oughta be heading back,” Arthur rasps when they finally break apart, panting, foreheads pressed together. Charles feels the odd raw heat of him, pressed against Charles’s skin, bleeding through the cotton of his shirt. “Dutch—” 

“Dutch can wait,” Charles says, gripping at the tangled mess at the back of Arthur’s head. “He’ll be fine.” His throat hurts. “Jesus, Arthur,” he spits, “I thought I lost you.” 

He hears the repeated catch in Arthur’s breath as he lets out a sharp exhale, his fingers gripping tighter at Charles’s neck. Charles can’t see his face, but he feels Arthur’s answer in his body, the way his shoulders unclench, his hands cling harder; the mirror of Charles’s own agonized relief. 

“Guess I thought so too,” Arthur says, and Charles doesn’t know which of them he means, but he can feel Arthur’s heartbeat under his palm, sharp and out of rhythm. He puts his other hand to Arthur’s rough jaw and lifts his face to kiss him again, hard. 

For a while, that’s enough: kissing Arthur, with the putrid smoke from the belly of the cave clogging the air and his hands moving across the tight muscles of Arthur’s back, pulling him closer as if their two bodies could melt into each other and become one hot, living thing. The fear he carried out of sight for weeks is falling away fast, replaced by a brutally earnest need to fuck Arthur till neither of them can see straight. 

He waits till Arthur’s hips are moving incessantly, jerking against Charles in time with his harsh, whining pants, then digs in his bag for the tin of Vaseline, puts a hand on each of Arthur’s biceps, and shoves, pinning him up against the slick stone of the cave wall. Arthur’s eyes are wide, pupils blown as he watches Charles work a hand into his jeans, undoing the buttons there, pulling his cock free and giving it a few cruelly slow tugs with the hand not pressing Arthur’s weight against the wall. 

Charles presses lower with his fingers, searching, teasing, holding Arthur up as he grinds down against Charles’s hand. He makes a noise like a strangled bird when Charles works his way inside and prods at the right spot, the spot they found in that hotel in Blackwater what feels like years ago, when they knew each other’s names and not much else. He rocks his fingers into Arthur again and again, rubbing against that hidden junction of nerves, listening to the mounting pitch of Arthur’s voice as he moans and coughs and keens against Charles’s steady shoulder. 

The noise Arthur lets out when Charles takes his fingers away to undo his own pants is so outraged, so blindly _annoyed_ , that Charles has to laugh. The sound echoes against the cave walls, and Charles dips his head to lay a quick, apologetic kiss on the angry head of Arthur’s cock. Arthur coughs, spits, growls “get _on_ with it, already,” but he’s grinning. Charles can’t believe what that does to his chest. It feels like he’s splitting open, like Arthur just poured sunshine straight onto his beating heart.

He lines himself up and pushes into Arthur, taking it slow, breathing deep into each movement. He’s braced against the wall with one arm, using the other hand to guide himself, to reach up and rub a thumb over the drooling head of Arthur’s cock, just for the satisfaction of feeling him flinch and hiss and writhe under Charles’s touch, pressing down a little further on his cock until he’s fully inside. It takes a moment to find a rhythm—they’re both tired, wrung out from weeks of work and worry, and the cave wall isn’t the most hospitable spot—but before long he’s moving in Arthur, slow cautious thrusts giving way to a relentless pulse that has Arthur bucking against him, grinding, desperate for friction and unable to keep quiet when Charles hit the right angle and Arthur’s whole body twists in frantic pleasure. 

He’s loud and rude and hoarse and Charles loves him. Arthur shouts and jolts and calls Charles a _fucking bastard motherfucker Jesus Christ fuck_ , and Charles fucks him quick and hard against the stone wall, and when Arthur jerks in his arms and chokes out “ah, _shit_ ” and starts to come against Charles’s naked belly, Charles puts a hand to his cock and strokes him through the aftershocks. It’s Arthur’s weight, collapsing against him as his orgasm ends, that sends Charles over the edge, pumping into Arthur with his mouth open and panting against the unnatural heat of Arthur’s bare shoulder. 

Arthur starts coughing in the afterglow. It bends him double, shaking against Charles again. It sounds like it hurts. 

They set up a tent near the dying campfire, or: Charles sets up a tent near the dying campfire while Arthur wipes himself off and goes, as Charles instructed, to sit and catch his breath again. Charles watches him from the corner of his eye as he works. He realizes, watching Arthur button his jeans and settle himself by the fire and twitch the overgrown hair out of his eyes, that he’s backed himself into a corner here. 

He loves Arthur. It happened somewhere on the road behind them, with no way of mapping it out, and now Charles has everything to lose and nothing—he’s known this from this start—nothing to gain from staying in this story. He watches Arthur poke at the smoking embers and squint up at the starless sky, and knows, with a clarity on which he’s often prided himself, that he’s fucked. 

With that in mind, he drives the last peg into the mud and calls Arthur over. In the darkness beneath the canvas, with fatigue pulling at him, Charles draws his thumb over the creases in Arthur’s face, and allows himself a very beautiful lie: _it’s going to be okay._

  
  


**Nancy Wallace — 1902**

In 1879, Ebenezer Wallace and his young wife Nancy made the long journey from Chicago to the state of Argent—what the _Tribune_ called “the last untamed section of the great American frontier.” Ebenezer, a banking clerk with a taste for adventure and minimal prospects for advancement, took the _Tribune’s_ phrase to heart, decided that if no one else was going to tame the frontier, he would, and purchased an eighteen-foot wagon and four oxen. Ebenezer and Nancy crossed the prairie in the spring of ‘79, navigated the eastern Grizzlies with the aid of a guidebook, and made their way along the Dornbach River in the path of the ill-fated Reed party of 1856. 

Reaching the mining community of Comstock, Ebenezer learned that the untrammeled lifestyle of the independent prospector had been replaced by the iron hand of industry, personified in the silver magnate Augustus Dupont Cole. Cole, who traveled west as a young man after the Civil War reached a conclusion unsatisfying to his family’s business interests, made his fortune developing land around Fort Turner, abandoned by the Latter-Day Saints only two years after its hasty construction in 1864, when a brief spurt of violence between the Union Army and the local Indian nations made a fort not only a precious, but a necessary commodity. 

Many historians today regard A.D. Cole as the primary architect of the state of Argent, but by 1879 his finances were in decline, brought low by the gradual depletion of both the silver lode and the enthusiasm of eastern pioneers for a new life in the wild country of the Sagehen Mountains. Ebenezer Wallace, flush with cash if not with good sense, lent Cole a considerable sum of money, taking 900 acres of ranching land around the site of the abandoned fort as collateral. When Cole failed to pay off the debt, Ebenezer and Nancy took ownership of the land, and moved to Las Praderas to begin their career as ranchers. 

In 1881, the year after the debt came due and the land became theirs in the eyes of the law, Ebenezer Wallace rode to the neighboring ranch of one Fredson Bowers to inquire about a matter of grazing rights. No witnesses have ever come forward to report what transpired between the two men, but the outcome of the conversation was beyond doubt: Fredson Bowers shot Ebenezer down in plain daylight, and sent a messenger over to Nancy to tell her to come and collect the body. Nancy sent two hired hands over to the Bowers place, and with no lumber available on the 900 acres of which she was now exclusive proprietor, she gave directions to take the doors off the house to build Ebenezer a coffin. 

In the twenty years Ebenezer’s been dead, Nancy never cried where anyone could see her. She set to work making the dead land into something living, hired a team of men to till the land and another team to patrol the property against anyone hoping to finish what Fred Bowers started. Slowly but surely, the desert around her empty house became a thriving ranch, and the money in the bank at the state capital in Big Flats multiplied. For the past ten years she’s been the richest woman in the state, the west’s biggest rancher, and, she thinks, the loneliest person in the world. She stands on her front porch in the morning and looks at the land, hundreds of beautiful acres spread out around her singing with life, and she hates it for what it’s taken from her. 

In 1902, an agent of the Pacific Union Railroad Company comes to Nancy’s door, and makes the offer that a hundred agents in nice suits have made before: five dollars an acre for the railroad to take away what she built for Ebenezer. Civilization’s coming to Argent, he tells her, and the governor wants a rail line to link up Big Flats to Las Praderas, and Las Praderas to California and the Pacific Ocean and beyond. Nancy sits at her kitchen table, listening to this college boy talk to her about progress, and thinks about the ocean, thinks of the ranch house as a tiny wooden ark. She thinks about Fred Bowers’s dopey son, who’s been raising sheep and doing well at it, who came to her door last year with an odd bouquet of flowers and a speech about redemption and new beginnings. She thinks about crossing the mountains with Ebenezer, the day their wagon slid into the mud and they screamed at each other knee-deep in muck until they started to laugh.

She interrupts the railroad boy. “I’ll sign.” 

In the end, the contract she draws up with the lawyer from the P.U.R.R.C. stipulates that 899 of the acres she and Ebenezer got from Augustus D. Cole will pass into the possession of the railroad, for the purpose of constructing a railroad line to Las Praderas from the capital. Nancy keeps a single acre for herself—the corner of her American dream where Ebenzer’s coffin is buried, made from the doors of the house they built, sleeping forever six feet under the desert marigolds. 

  
  


**Arthur — 1903**

Civilization is coming to Argent. Arthur wishes it wouldn’t. 

In the three years he’s spent in the south of the state, Arthur’s watched Las Praderas transform from a vast cattle plantation guarded by a private cavalry into the kind of fledgling frontier city he’s seen springing up in every climate east of the Lannahechee: an ever-changing collection of clapboard businesses feeding off the fat artery of a dusty main street. When Arthur first came here, Las Praderas was a general store built out of the clay skeleton of the old fort, and the raw stucco edifice of Our Lady of Mercy in its shadow. Since the widow Wallace sold her land to the railroad, Las Praderas has grown two cross streets, a proper post office built of shiny pine, and a second saloon, which is where Arthur finds himself on most nights when Fred Bowers doesn’t need him to run inventory on the ranch. 

He’s there tonight, leaning against the bar eating peanuts and listening to a handful of Pacific Union men arguing over some boxing match set for next month up in Comstock; the fight of the century already with ninety-seven years to go. The death of silver, evidently, has made sin big business in Argent. The state legislature passed a set of bills in the spring legalizing everything from prostitution to gambling, and right now Arthur can hear the racket of hammers at the end of the street where old Augustus Cole is putting up a a new hotel complete with blackjack tables and roulette wheels. 

“Gonna be a real palace,” the bartender told him last week, when Arthur asked what the hell the fuss was about. He polished a glass with a special fury and set it on the counter, gleaming. “Gonna take honest business away from folks been providing refreshment within the confines of the law.” 

“Aww, George,” Arthur said, the honest warmth of good whiskey making him awfully fond of the poor fellow, “you know I ain’t goin’ anywhere.” 

“Well,” George said, mollified, “I do appreciate that,” and gave Arthur a drink on the house. It was, on balance, a good night. 

He told George the truth, Arthur thinks now, looking at his chapped hands on the gleaming surface of the bar. He’s going nowhere, has been since he lost Dutch—or Dutch lost him—or—he can’t remember. At three years’ distance, the memory feels empty, as though he’s studied it so many times that the color’s leached away and there’s nothing left to see. But he can’t stop looking back, and so here he is, keeping George Foster’s saloon open and shepherding Fred Bowers, Jr. through his sad little life. Going nowhere. 

He thinks, sometimes, about leaving the ranch, taking his horse and his bags and his journal and heading up the Dornbach to the Sagehens, where things are still wild and nobody’s fixing to build palaces. He thinks about Hamish Sinclair, alone in his cabin by the water, living with ghosts and carrying on all the same with his two hands and his gun. Not bothering no one, Arthur thinks. Not asking for nothing. Just living. 

Living, of course, is the problem. Since Dr. Robinson’s treatment, Arthur’s been well enough: breathing easy at night, not bringing up blood, and putting back a bit of the weight he lost in the bad years. George Foster and his highly affordable beer helped with that. Still, it seems as though the thing’s never really going to leave him, nor kill him outright, which Arthur thinks he would prefer. Instead, he’s on a short tether, keeping to the warm desert country for fear a change in altitude will send him back to Robinson’s ranch for a needle in his back. So he drinks in the shadow of old Fort Turner at night and rides back to Bowers’ Ranch to keep doing nothing. 

He’s on his way out of town a few nights later, empty and full and thinking about nothing at all, when he lurches out of his saddle to drop off a letter at the immaculate post office and gets hit across his stupid drunk face with a piece of the past. 

It’s a handbill pasted to the huge board that takes up most of the post office’s western wall, rendered in gaudy detail and depicting two men in boxing trunks, their fists up, bodies locked against each other. Their names crowd the poster in huge block letters: KAPLAN V. SMITH, FIGHT OF THE CENTURY. Arthur looks at it, standing alone on the sidewalk with the desert night crackling and trilling around him, and feels as though Dr. Robinson’s apparatus is sucking the air out of his chest. 

It’s Charles. It’s not the most faithful drawing—the man on the poster is a little slimmer, his nose a little straighter than the image in Arthur’s mind, but he’s got the same long hair, worn loose the way it was when they first met, and the artist’s drawn in the odd little lightning-bolt scar on his right jaw. It’s unmistakable; it’s _Charles_ . Arthur’s heart is pumping wildly as he picks at the loose edge of the poster, untucks it from the layers of paper plastered over the notice board, and brings it into the light of the streetlamp above his head. _Ambarino’s Lone Wolf versus the World Heavyweight Champion_ , the text curling above Charles’s head reads. _Five thousand dollars to the winner, 20 dollars entry._

Arthur’s hand is shaking. The paper flutters. 

Dr. Robinson called it a second chance, and Arthur’s been wasting it—he won’t pretend otherwise. If he’s honest with himself, which he tries not to be if he can possibly help it, it’s never really felt like a second chance so much as an accident, a clerical error on the cosmic scale that left him alive and better men dead in the east. He’s hanging in limbo, with nowhere to go and nothing to fight for, and now there’s _this_ —

Arthur turns where he’s standing, looks behind him; looks across the street. It feels like someone’s watching him, and laughing. But there’s nobody here, just an old dog snuffling for scraps in the dried mud, and voices in the distance from the saloons at either end of town. He folds up the poster, careful not to lay the creases across Charles’s picture, and hauls himself back into the saddle, heading out into the starlit desert weighed down with memory. 

By the time he makes it back to the ranch, he’s made up his mind. 

  
  


**John Marston — 1899**

The thing about Arthur Morgan, in John’s expert opinion as someone who’s known him longer than anyone with the exception of Dutch and Hosea, is that he’s a goddamn hypocrite. 

When John got cold feet, panicked or whatever and took off for a while to let his head cool down and his feet warm up, to let his good sense get back to him or his bad sense kill him, Arthur about murdered him anyway when he got back. For weeks, it was nothing but trouble with him and Arthur, who wouldn’t even fucking _speak_ to John until about a month in, and then it was only to call him a goddamn rat and insinuate, or whatever the word was, that John was only back because he got too hungry and didn’t know how to hunt without blasting the whole squirrel into rodent jam. Or something. John stopped listening after the first few words and got up to pass himself the damn cornbread, while Hosea bickered with Arthur and everybody else minded their own damn business. Loyalty, that’s what matters to Arthur, and damn anyone who has a different idea of what that might mean. 

But now it’s Arthur who’s been away for the better part of a month, playing poker in some saloon in Blackwater while John busts his ass running jobs for Dutch and trying to keep the camp in enough rabbit and prairie chicken to fill everyone’s stomach at the end of the day, and it’s Arthur who has the goddamned impudence to stroll into camp on the night before the ferry job grinning from ear to fucking ear, bouncing around like he’s got damn springs in the soles of his boots. He says he’s been doing reconnaissance for this scheme him and Hosea are cooking up, him and Charles, the half-Indian fella they picked up a few months back, but John knows better. 

Arthur’s been getting laid. 

If it weren’t for the confounded irony of the situation, John would be pleased for him. Arthur’s been in a permanent sour mood ever since Mary told him he weren’t good enough for her, and Christ knows that John has borne the brunt of his unrelenting misery, but it really is a bit goddamn rich for Arthur to chew John out like he broke the holy fucking grail or some shit, and then turn around and spend three solid weeks fucking some Blackwater girl and acting like the gang, and anyone else not currently on his prick, don’t exist. 

It’s just odd. 

“Good day, Marston?” Arthur asks, sailing past John on his way to the mess tent, not even stopping to hear John’s answer. That big dopey smile’s still slopped across his face. John despises him. 

Anyways. Tomorrow John’s going to ride into Blackwater with Dutch and the others, and they’re going to ride back with an obscene amount of fucking cash, and Arthur can do what he wants because John is going to be ten times richer than him, and that’s that. 

Across the camp, Arthur’s standing by the fire with a bowl of stew in his hand, staring stupidly into the distance with his mouth a little slack. He doesn’t seem to care that he’s about to be the poorest man here. John wonders what the hell got into him. 

Tomorrow, he thinks. Things’ll change. 

  
  


**Arthur — 1903**

Comstock is a city trapped between the cupped hands of the Sagehen Mountains. The town spreads out from the lofty state courthouse in a sparse grid anchored to the desert by two long strings of telephone poles. The Pacific Union Railroad hasn’t blasted its way through the mountains here yet, so the depot on the western side of town welcomes stages and wagons dusted with red sand, and the peaks above the city’s rooftops stand white and unbroken against the blue sky. It’s a town of miners and ex-miners, gamblers and saloon keepers, madams and drifters and people looking to unload some past version of themselves and pick up a new one. Beyond the gleaming cupola of the courthouse rise the steeples of no less than five churches—Catholic, Baptist, Presbyterian, Methodist, and a chapel built by the Chinese miners who came up from California—and for every church, there are two pool halls and four rooming houses with reputations that would get them raided in any state east of Saint Denis. 

Arthur takes a room in one of these boarding houses, run by a woman named Laura Goode who reminds him, just a bit, of Miss Grimshaw when she was younger: red lipstick, hair like a righteous windstorm, and a look like she’d as soon whip you as serve you supper. She shows him to a room at the end of a long hall that reeks of cigar smoke and piss, where Arthur can hear moaning through the walls at three in the afternoon, and tells him dinner’s at eight. 

“Wash your face,” she says around her cigarette, and disappears. Oh, Arthur feels at home all right. 

The fight’s tomorrow. It’s set for high noon, in a lot on the eastern edge of town between the city brewery and the livery stable. On his way into town, Arthur saw no less than thirteen posters advertising the fight of the century, and every time, his heart knocked against his ribs. Now, sitting in the tiny, stinking bedroom above Miss Goode’s dining room, Arthur feels the blood caught in his face, making him a little dizzy with anticipation; Charles is _here_ , somewhere, maybe blocks away, maybe doors. Arthur feels brainless. Giddy. It feels good. 

What he wasn’t anticipating, riding up through the brick-red mountains, the poster folded in his bag and Charles’s voice in his head, was guilt. It’s a sick undercurrent beneath the excitement, sourceless and aimless but unabating, and for a moment as he sits on the bed and stares at his hands, it swells until it’s a sharp pain pushing at his breastbone. He doesn’t deserve to be here, chasing after something he’s got no business wanting in the first place; it feels like he’s cheating. He feels like he’s lying to someone, and he doesn’t know who. 

He shakes the feeling off, and washes his face in the tin basin waiting on the dresser. After a week in the mountains, his beard is a rough bush, and he takes advantage of the flinty mirror to trim and shave it into what approaches, he hopes, decent shape. He feels nervous, fog in his belly like he felt when he first rode out with a girl. He can imagine Hosea at his elbow, laughing. It doesn’t hurt as much, these days, to imagine Hosea. 

The sun dips and reddens the sky behind the mountains, then sinks away into night, and Arthur heads down to dinner as the street lamps start glowing along Swan Street. That night, he lies awake for hours in the cool darkness, unable to sleep, listening to fights and music from the street below and the loud, impatient rhythm of his heart. 

The morning of the fight of the century, Arthur finds frost on the window above his bed. He stands for a moment before the bubbled glass, tracing a thumb through the feathers, watching water well and dribble at his touch. He washes his face, wishes Miss Goode a pleasant morning, and steps out into the street to join the crowds already streaming towards the lot behind the brewery. 

Comstock’s population has roughly doubled overnight for the match. This morning, as the sun climbs overhead, thousands of people are crowding into the stands set up in the last few days by a crew of day laborers rounded up from barrooms across the city. The ring stands in the center, a tantalizing blank space drawing bodies closer like a great canvas magnet laced with thick rope. In the seats nearest to the platform are men in silk hats and women in satin ruffles with artificial roses piled on their heads, but as the bleachers rise up behind that glitzy crowd, farmers sit side by side with railroad workers and clerks come up for the day from the Pacific Union office. Arthur finds a seat between a Chinese tailor smoking pungent cigarettes and a tall, ugly kid of about fifteen who smells of pigs and whiskey. 

When the sun is nearly overhead, a sudden ripple of activity at either end of the square sends shouts through the waiting crowd. Arthur watches as the bodies below surge and split like water, and a tall, knotty man Arthur recognizes as Tommy Kaplan steps into his corner. Across the ring, a matching commotion snarls the crowd, and the man who emerges from the tight-packed audience is Charles. 

A hundred feet away, Arthur feels his heart stop. 

Charles is—he’s Charles. Stripped to the waist in the morning sun, a little shorter than Kaplan but nearly twice as broad; he’s strolling easily in his corner, squinting up at the mountains in the distance. Arthur has the feeling, watching him, that he’s scarcely aware of the gathered, hooting hordes ranged around him, and that’s Charles—that quiet focus, that _serenity_. Here to do what he came to do and not to worry about the rest. Arthur listens as the bells of five churches start striking twelve in imperfect unison, and watches the sunlight gleam off Charles’s bare back. 

A few minutes after the church bells quiet, the referee brings Charles and Kaplan to the center of the ring. The two shake hands, another bell clangs, and as Arthur’s eyes sting in the bitter smoke from the tailor’s cigarette, the fight of the century begins. 

Arthur has seen Charles fight before, many times, but this is different. There’s a calculated, patient energy to his body as he circles Kaplan, ducking, jabbing, taking his time. He’s in no hurry. Kaplan, by contrast, is a ferocious force, battering Charles, pushing him back towards the ropes, but Charles just blocks and counters and keeps his head low. Businesslike, Arthur thinks. Charles always was the damn gentleman. 

The bell rings once, twice; Kaplan gets in a solid punch in the second round, and Charles staggers back. He recovers instantly, fists raised and shoulders square, but when the bell rings again and the fighters retreat to their corners, Arthur can see blood streaming down Charles’s face, a squat man in shirtsleeves rushing to wipe it down with a towel. Charles doesn’t seem to notice, but Arthur sees his chest heaving, bright with sweat, and thinks—but maybe he’s imagining it—that he can see an odd twist in Charles’s face as he watches Kaplan across the empty canvas. 

In the next round, Charles transforms. The patience drops from his shoulders; he’s on the offensive now, raining sharp blows on Kaplan’s chest and shoulders, his entire body working in concert with every punch, so that the crowd howls as blood begins to spatter under Kaplan’s feet. They’re angry, Arthur realizes. This isn’t what they came to see. Charles delivers one decisive uppercut to Kaplan’s jaw, and the champion topples. Charles stands over him, hair blowing in the desert breeze, his body taut and dripping with ruddy sweat, while the referee bawls out the count and the spectators bellow and Arthur feels his own heart beating in time with Charles’s heavy breaths. 

Kaplan hauls himself back to his feet before the referee counts six. Even at a distance, Arthur sees Charles’s grin. 

The fight resumes, and Kaplan is flagging. His foot slips on the canvas as Charles evades his fist and drives a heavy blow into his ribs, but he stays up this time, dripping, panting, desperate. The two grapple, break free, then collide again in a frantic, whirling clinch that grinds on until the bell rings and they fall away, back into their corners while the kid at Arthur’s shoulder hollers at the top of his lungs, _kill the wolf_ , _kill ‘im_. The bell rings again, Charles surges up from his corner, and Arthur realizes that he’s holding his breath. 

It ends in the fifth round. After a brief clinch, Charles breaks loose, wheels away from Kaplan’s wild swing, and lands a punch that collapses Kaplan’s weight into the canvas. He doesn’t get up. With the count of _ten_ , the stands erupt in incoherent noise, as the thousands of people who came to see Tommy Kaplan defend his title realize that the Great White Hope’s just been beaten by a half-Indian black man from nowhere. 

Arthur isn’t quite sure how he makes it from his seat in the stands through the savage press of bodies to the edge of the ring, only that he feels battered by the time he gets there. Charles is towering above him, blood washing out half his face, flanked by the short man with the bloody towel and a couple of other fellows, alarm visible on each of their faces as the mob roars and starts climbing the ropes. 

“ _CHARLES!”_ Arthur feels his chest tighten as Charles frowns, turns, and scans the crowd. For a moment, Arthur thinks he’s not going to see him. The throng’s too thick, the chaos is too loud, and the fever in the air feels like a lynching about to happen. At Arthur’s ear, somebody bawls _get that goddamn monkey out of here_. 

“ _CHARLES!”_

The second time Arthur yells, Charles sees him. He stops; frowns, stares. At first, he looks almost angry. And then, for a few seconds, Arthur stops breathing, and the entire world is composed of absolutely nothing but the stupendous wonder breaking over Charles’s perfect, shattered face. 

He comes to his senses as a man built like a wardrobe tries to push ahead of him, his shaggy head blocking out Charles’s face. Arthur shoves past him, and then finally, finally, his face is against the ropes, just feet away from Charles. 

Up close, Charles looks different. His hair’s longer than when Arthur last saw him, thrown wildly over his shoulders and sticking to the blood on his face. He’s a little heavier, his gut pushed out a bit over the sweat-stained waist of his trunks, and Arthur can see new scars on his arms and chest, bright streaks against his dark skin. Arthur can tell his nose has been broken at least once. 

Charles breaks away from the men trying to lead him off and runs to Arthur, pulling him up, hauling him over the thick ropes, and Arthur’s enveloped in the smell of him, caught up in a hug that pushes the air out of his lungs, and Arthur thinks he would be deliriously happy to never breathe again. 

Charles pulls back, cupping Arthur’s cheek, the warmth of his hand making Arthur dizzy, and yells above the noise of the crowd, “What the _hell_ are you doing here?” 

Arthur doesn’t get a chance to answer. Someone tries to throw a bottle at Charles’s head, and everything happens very quickly after that. The small group of grim-faced men ushers Charles off the platform and through the swarm of protestors, and Arthur follows, can’t _not_ follow, dragged along as though there’s a rope knotted in his guts connecting him to Charles. Before he knows what’s happened, they’re in a stagecoach, rattling over the long dusty road out of town with seven mounted deputies flanking the wagon, and Charles is right _here_ , all of him, wiping blood off his cheek with the back of his hand and staring at Arthur like he’s trying to decide if he’s real. 

Arthur isn’t sure. Watching Charles, the feeling that he’s not supposed to be here multiplies, disorients him. He feels small. Ugly. He thinks that if Dutch knew he was here, he’d be rolling his eyes. 

“How are you alive,” is the first thing Charles says. Arthur can’t read his expression; he’d forgotten that about Charles, the way he was in the early days, how you could never tell what he was thinking. Charles wipes blood from the corner of his mouth, frowning. “I saw you, Arthur, you—” He shakes his head. “You were a dead man walking.”

“Still am, I guess,” Arthur says, hearing the apology in his own voice. “I been gettin’ treatment from a doctor down south.” He shrugs. “Seemed to work.” 

“How’d you get away?”

“Everyone else was gone.” Arthur doesn’t know how to explain. “I got John and Abigail away, them and their kid. And then—well, then it was over. And I came out west.” He shakes his head. “I thought you was in Canada.”

“I was,” Charles answers. Doesn’t go on. His mouth’s still working. “And. Dutch?” 

Arthur could have known that question was coming. It hurts anyway. He shrugs. “He got away.” 

Charles nods again, looking out the window at the desert lurching past, and it’s only now, with Charles’s dark eyes caught in the afternoon sun, that Arthur realizes he’s crying. 

Arthur doesn’t know what to say. He’s never been good with crying—not doing it, not watching it; he’s never seen Charles cry before. It’s completely silent, just tears spilling over his heavy lids, drawing long tracks through the sweat and blood of the fight, his jaw held tensely as he watches the horizon. They’re driving through open desert now, the mountains a sharp ridge in the distance, Comstock’s dark rooftops growing smaller behind them, and the condors circle and shriek overhead, and Arthur feels his heart coming apart in his chest. 

“C’mon now,” he says. Thick. Quiet. _Stupid._ “That ain’t—I—look—” 

“I’m sorry,” Charles says, dragging a hand over his face, and he sounds angry. “I’m sorry. I’m tired, Arthur.” 

Arthur has fucked this up, _really_ fucked it up. He feels impossibly ugly, a dumb cowpoke put together wrong, invading this moment and turning it into something awful. He looks down at his own empty hands, unable to watch Charles’s face any longer. Dutch’s voice in his head is a thunderstorm. 

“I looked for you,” Charles says. His voice is soft, stumbling in a way Charles never does, and when Arthur looks up, he sees Charles isn’t looking at him. He’s watching the sky instead. “I came back when I heard—and for _weeks_ , I looked. Through the mountains. All, all over that old country. I thought—for sure, I thought Dutch killed you.” 

Arthur’s stomach feels as though they just hit an exceptionally large rock. He swallows. “No,” is all he can say. “No, he didn’t.” 

And then he’s kissing Charles, leaning across the space between their bodies, his hands planted on either side of Charles’s split and bleeding face, fingers in his sweaty hair. He rubs a thumb across Charles’s cheek, careful not to touch his broken skin, careful not to hurt him more, and Charles kisses back, breathless and urgent and careless enough to draw blood at the corner of Arthur’s lip. 

They kiss until Arthur remembers there’s a full posse of Comstock lawmen riding alongside. He breaks away, reluctantly, and makes the incredible discovery that Charles is smiling—the off-balance, artless grin Arthur has still only seen on a treasured few occasions, only this time he’s got tears in his eyes and blood on his chin. Arthur, struck with the utterly ludicrous position they’re in—racing across the desert in the middle of nowhere, on the run _with_ the law for a change—feels himself returning the smile in spite of himself. 

“I missed you,” Charles says. “If I’d known you’d come running, I’d have fought Kaplan a damn sight sooner.” He’s laughing. He’s angry. Arthur wants to kiss him again. 

Instead, he falls back against the seat, breathless and stupid, his shoulder pressed against Charles’s, laughing aloud with the absurdity of it all. He feels something foreign splitting open at the bottom of his belly, like some strange flower, and realizes that it’s joy. 

Ten miles down the road, the sheriff’s men peel away at a crossroads, riding back across the desert in the same direction as the sinking sun. The wagon carries on up the dusty highway, losing them in the broken foothills. 

  
  


**Charles — 1903**

On the night of the fight of the century, thirteen men die in four states because of Charles. In New York, riots break out below Fourteenth Street over the defeat of Tommy Kaplan, son of the East Side, and angry fans beat a black man named Harrison Williams to death in front of a bar. In Lemoyne, outside Doyle’s Tavern in Saint Denis, four men die in a brawl fueled by equal measures of whiskey and racial animosity. San Francisco, home to Joe Clifford and Tommy Kaplan’s boxing club, sees two full weeks of violence, beginning with seven deaths and ending in the injury of some twenty more. And in Comstock itself, a group of incensed spectators take a torch to the dry goods business of Clyde Johnson and lynch a railroad worker named James Hall. 

Of course, Charles won’t know any of this until later. And of course, once he knows it, everything’s going to change. Once the headlines roll in, he’ll carry those thirteen men with him for the rest of his life, the same way he’s been carrying Eagle Flies, and Black Shawl’s daughter, and a hundred others. The way he carried Arthur with him for years. 

Tonight, though, Charles doesn’t know what’s happening in New York and in Saint Denis and in San Francisco. Tonight, he’s at the northern edge of the Sagehen Mountains, in an old silver town shrunken by time, and tonight, Arthur is alive. 

Any other night, Charles would be camping outside town, sleeping under the stars and keeping his name off the books, but tonight’s different. Arthur says he wants to get Charles into a bed, and so he’s the one who leads them to the last building on the street, two stories of tilting clapboard with a lantern on the porch and a bar downstairs doing slow business for a handful of sunburnt old men. Arthur signs the register at the bar, hands over four quarters, and leads Charles up the rickety back stairs. 

Watching Arthur’s shadow ascend the staircase, Charles feels like he’s moving through a dream. 

The room is small and dark, lit by a spitting candle and an oil lamp that reeks and smokes. There’s a single window in the southern wall, throwing four squares of moonlight on the narrow bed. Arthur’s swollen shadow moves with him as he crosses to the low cabinet and sets about filling a washbasin with cool water. 

“Gotta clean you up,” he says. Charles can’t get over his voice. It’s softer than he remembered, each syllable overlaid with its own particular lilt. It’s like listening to music. He sits on the chair by the window and lifts his shirt over his head. 

Arthur soaks a rag in the basin and sets to work, rubbing gently at the blood and sweat dried across Charles’s neck and shoulders. The rag’s rusted brown almost immediately, but Arthur’s methodical, working his way across Charles’s skin with his rough, broad hands. 

“Think they’re broken?” he asks as he passes the cloth over Charles’s ribs and hears the sharp intake of breath that follows. 

“Probably,” Charles assents, and Arthur just nods, squeezing the rag into the basin. Brown into brown; they’ll have to change the water soon. 

There’s no sound in the room except their two breaths, matching each other as Arthur dabs at the cuts on Charles’s face, his own face thrown into lopsided shadows by the moonlight. He’s changed. He’s thinner, much thinner, eaten at by time and sickness and something else Charles senses but can’t name for him, something sad and peculiar. Like grief for the living. Charles wonders if he’ll ever know what happened. He probably won’t. He thinks he can live with that. 

“Careful now,” Arthur says, low and sweet, and his hands are on Charles’s face, tender, electric. He drags the cloth over Charles’s split eyebrow, frowning like a schoolboy working sums, and rinses the cloth. Charles feels a shiver work its way up his spine, and closes his eyes as the wave crests and breaks over his aching shoulders. 

His eyes are still closed, sleep already dragging at his heavy lids, when Arthur kisses him. 

It’s soft and unhurried, not like in the stagecoach, when nothing seemed real and kissing Arthur felt like touching lightning. Now, close and solid and quiet, Arthur kisses his mouth once, then touches his lips to Charles’s cheek, and then his forehead, kissing where he’s washed away the blood, each touch accompanied by the lightest frisson of pain. 

Instinct moves Charles’s hands along the sinews of Arthur’s sturdy arms, up his neck and down to his hips, pulling Arthur in between his thighs. It’s awkward, but Charles isn’t looking for grace. He ducks his head and trails his mouth along Arthur’s throat, dropping clumsy kisses at the corner of his jaw and against his collarbone, feeling the slow rush of blood underneath Arthur’s skin as he flushes and hums and loses his fingers in the hair at the nape of Charles’s neck. 

Charles feels Arthur drop a hand to his waist, his thumb fidgeting with Charles’s belt, and for a minute Charles rolls against the sensation, dragging his crotch against Arthur’s wrist. But that’s all. Charles’s ribs are broken. 

The oil lamp stinks. The candle gutters. Charles wants to stay here forever. 

There’s barely room for both their bodies side by side on the bed, but they manage, turning sideways so that Charles’s heart is pressed against Arthur’s solid back, his arm around Arthur’s belly. It rises and falls with each breath, and this is what keeps Charles awake all night, as Arthur drifts and snores and shifts easily in his sleep. That steady rhythm. The simple, miraculous surety of air passing in and out of this body Charles knows and loves so well. 

He lies awake, and feels Arthur’s breath under his hand, as the earth turns beneath them and the stars fade out of the sky. 

  
  
  


_WHEN I heard at the close of the day how my name had_

_been received with plaudits in the capitol, still it was_

_not a happy night for me that followed;_

_And else, when I caroused, or when my plans were_

_accomplished, still I was not happy;_

_But the day when I rose at dawn from the bed of perfect_

_health, refreshed, singing, inhaling the ripe breath of_

_autumn,_

_When I saw the full moon in the west grow pale and_

_disappear in the morning light,_

_When I wandered alone over the beach, and,_

_undressing, bathed, laughing with the cool waters,_

_and saw the sun rise,_

_And when I thought how my dear friend, my lover, was_

_on his way coming, O then I was happy;_

_O then each breath tasted sweeter—and all that day my_

_food nourished me more—And the beautiful day_

_passed well,_

_And the next came with equal joy—And with the next,_

_at evening, came my friend;_

_And that night, while all was still, I heard the waters roll_

_slowly continually up the shores,_

_I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid and sands, as_

_directed to me, whispering, to congratulate me,_

_For the one I love most lay sleeping by me under the_

_same cover in the cool night,_

_In the stillness, in the autumn moonbeams, his face was_

_inclined toward me,_

_And his arm lay lightly around my breast—And that_

_night I was happy._

_-_ Walt Whitman

**Author's Note:**

> Argent is, of course, a mere figment of my imagination, an excuse not to bind myself to geographic or historical accuracy, but it is based heavily on the Great Basin area of the western United States, particularly Nevada and Utah. The name is French for silver (Nevada is known as the Silver State). The Dornbach is the Humboldt; the Sagehens are the Spring Mountains, and a reference to one of Nevada's other state nicknames. Big Flats is Salt Lake City; Comstock is Carson City, and Las Praderas is Las Vegas. The history of Las Praderas, including the old Mormon fort, the promoter Augustus Dupont Cole, and poor Nancy Wallace, is stripped more or less directly from the pages of history, with the serial numbers filed off and names altered for the purposes of fiction. Helen Stewart, to whom Nancy Wallace is my answer, really did tell the hired hands to take the doors off the house to build her husband a coffin: https://www.nevadawomen.org/research-center/biographies-alphabetical/helen-j-stewart/. 
> 
> Artificial pneumothorax (read: collapsing someone's lung on purpose) really was a popular treatment for tuberculosis from the 1880s through the early 1900s. I'm taking some liberties, for storytelling purposes, with just how effective it was in terms of restoring people to full functionality, but the articles I drew on for a mechanical description of the process (particularly Malcolm F. Lent, "Artificial Pneumothorax with a Report of Fifteen Cases," JAMA [1915]) indicated that some patients really did show signs of improvement, so I ran with that. Dr. Floyd Robinson takes his name from the "Floyd-Robinson" apparatus used for the operation. 
> 
> For my take on the boxing world in the American West at the turn of the twentieth century, I drew heavily on Meg Frisbee's Counterpunch: The Cultural Battles Over Heavyweight Prizefighting in the American West (2016), which I highly recommend to anyone interested in this topic. The final fight between Charles and Tommy Kaplan is, of course, a rough take on the historic Johnson-Jeffries fight in Reno, which triggered racial violence in major cities across the country. Fred Vaughn is my version of boxing promoter Dan Stuart. His name is taken from the man supposed by some scholars to be the subject of Walt Whitman's Live Oak with Moss series (from which this fic takes its name, its epigraph, and so much more). I picture him as a kind of young Mark Sheppard type.


End file.
